I brought my snowshoe but didn't put it on. Easy snowshoeing trail for family outing but you should check avalanche condition before you hit this trail. An avalanche happened today near chair peak and I saw a rescue helicopter flied over the area to search victims. More stories and pics on this trip @ http://rblr.co/A7TG

Couple of pictures from this snowshoe trip: http://www.flickr.com/photos/urbandisturbance/sets/72157633015712984/ This was only my forth snowshoe trip ever, so I am still learning :-) We parked the car at the lot by the Alpental resort and then walked a few hundred yards to the trailhead. Followed the river for a mile or so and then veered left uphill where it looked like there was a snowshoe path. There was a lot of snow right form the parking lot, so no problems with that. I find orientation generally more difficult when snowshoeing than on summer hikes but we had a GPS and roughly knew where we were going. Weather was pretty dismal, snowing and fog but we made it up to Source Lake which almost wasn't visible because of snow cover. It's not much of a lake anyway, probably what they call a tarn, very small. Didn't take us very long to get there, 1.5 hours maybe so we went a bit further on to the viewpoint I took the panorama picture at. From there it would only have been just over half a (very steep) mile or so to get up to the ridge to see snow lake but the weather got much worse at that point so we turned around. Still a very nice trip and a good day to be out - hooray for waterproof clothing :-)

A short drive, a short hike, and beautiful scenery! We took the Snow Lake trail to get above Source Lake, then climbed about another 600 ft. to the divide between Snow and Source Lakes. Gorgeous! We returned via the valley floor to avoid the avalanche slopes on the Snow Lake trail.

First time on the trail, brought our little dog. great snow and really fun trail. It seems like there are several places to get on/off it--lots of skiers hiking up to do back-country skiing. Parked in lower parking lot and followed some other groups to the trail head (one of them). Great trail but more crowded than i was expecting. We'll be back!

Flickr: http://bit.ly/source-lake One of the ways getting to Source Lake is to take the Snow Lake Trail. Not sure if there's a hiker's path to the lake at the last big switchback leading up to the ridge to Snow Lake, but that's where one can begin their short scramble down to the lake. Met two lovely French ladies by the parking lot who were in need of a place to snowshoe, so I took them on an easy scramble. The lake was largely covered in snow and I couldn't tell how big it really was. We saw some people on the other side of the basin snowshoeing while taking photos by the lake. So instead of going back the way we came from, we made a loop to the other side of the basin then back to the parking lot.