I did this hike last July so a full report of this very strenuous trail can be found here.  Therefore, I'll try to keep this post short and sweet and mostly focus on the snow conditions.
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Marten Lake 04/20/2012
 
This is going to be short and sweet today because I am beat.  We left my house at about 5:30 AM with the intention of climbing up to Marten Lake from the Taylor River Trail which I hiked last summer.  The Middle Fork road has hundreds if not thousands of potholes.  Low clearance vehicles are not recommended.  The weather was rain, rain, and more rain. 
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Heather Lake 04/15/2012
 
I headed up the Mountain Loop Highway this morning to hike up to Heather Lake.  My hiking buddy had done this hike ~10 days prior while I was out of town so I decided to match him.  This is a fairly tame 4 mile round trip hike which climbs 1000 ft (1300 feet with ups and downs).  Heather Lake lies in the shadow of Mt. Pilchuck which I just climbed last summer.  The trailhead can be accessed on Forest Road 42 - the very same road that takes you to the Mt. Pilchuck trailhead.
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Little Si 03/29/2012
 
On Sunday morning my buddy and I got up early and headed out to North Bend for a nice easy hike up Little Si.  This is Mt. Si's very little brother and it was a breeze.  The trail is about 2 miles from car to summit and climbs about 1100 feet.  A sign at the trailhead indicates 2.2 miles.  I used my new GPS (thanks REI dividend!) for the first time and measured 1.9 miles.  We hit the trail at about 6:50 AM and it took just under an hour to get up to the top (which we had to ourselves).  The views were just okay.  We could look up at the summit of Mt. Si and to the south and southeast we could see Rattlesnake Mountain, Cedar Butte, and Mt. Washington.
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This morning my buddy, his dog, and I got up early to pay homage to the church of the Oyster Dome on Blanchard Mountain.  What we found was a cold, cloudy, wet, windy, muddy mess of a mountain.  It was awesome.   For the most part the mountain had adequate signage.  I didn't have a proper map so I just printed a terrain map from Google Maps.  I don't have a GPS (my upcoming REI dividend will fix that) so I don't have the exact distance, but other trail reports indicate that it's perhaps 8.5 miles via the route we took.  Also, we climbed from what was very near sea level up to 2000 feet on the dome.  My pictures for the most part aren't very good due to the rain and the clouds.

Blanchard Mountain is on State Route 11 just south of Bellingham.  The trailhead is just north of milepost 10.  We climbed up to the Oyster Dome from the road and then departed along the trail towards Lily Lake before returning via Max's Shortcut.  

We hit the trail at 6:35 AM.  From the first step the trail climbs sharply off of the road and it isn't long before the road disappears.  There is a nice bench and a break in the trees at about the 1 mile mark.  The views here on a sunny day would provide a preview of the views available at the dome.  To the west one can see Anacortes and a number of different islands in Bellingham Bay and across Puget Sound.  The Olympic Mountains would have been visible had the clouds not been so low.  Pretty soon after this point we found ourselves entering the low clouds.  At the 1.8 mile mark was a split in the trail.  A right turn would head up to the Samish Overlook (more on that later).  We continued along the main trail.
The trail to the dome was much steeper than we expected it to be.  It was also quite wet.  Mud would become a theme that we would revisit repeatedly along the way to the dome and beyond.  We passed one point where there was a side trail to a number of caves with a pretty good bat population but we skipped it and headed up.  Besides the water on the trail itself all of the streams that cross the trail were running pretty hard due to the recent precipitation.  The last picture below is looking back down at a particularly tough bit of very wet rocky and rooty trail I had just climbed.
There wasn't too much to see and there isn't too much to say about the dome itself.  I imagine on a warm sunny day this would be a fantastic place to be.  For us it was just wet rain and cold wind.  We explored around a bit on the ledges and other areas of the dome before finding a suitable rock to eat on.  I caught a good picture of my buddy trying to keep his sandwich dry.  I've placed a video below to provide an idea of just how socked in the views were.
After leaving the Oyster Dome we headed up the trail towards Lily Lake.  Taking this trail added a considerable distance to our trip but was much easier on our knees than returning the way we came.  The first section of trail was flat and open and was a welcome relief.  I caught what is probably my only good picture of the day (a slushy bog) at the junction of this trail and the trail called Max's Shortcut.
We followed Max's Shortcut down until we ran into the Samish Overlook.  It appears that a parking lot and bathrooms have been either recently built new or refurbished.  There were no cars parked there so I'm not sure if perhaps the forest road to the overlook is closed.  We were able to get some nice views of the sound from the overlook but to be honest they weren't too much different than what we'd seen from the bench earlier.  Only after heading down from the overlook did we start to see other people on the trail.
Just a little way down from the overlook we reconnected at the 1.8 mile point on the original trail and headed down to the car.  We got back to the car just after noon.  My buddy's dog was wiped out.  To be honest we were too.  It was a fun hike.  However, today it was more of a hike for the sake of hiking rather than for the views.  You'd had to love hiking to get up at 5 AM to kill your quads and knees climbing up in the cold rain to stand in the clouds and listen to the wind.  Am I right?
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After several months off from hiking, I have seriously been getting the itch to get out there.  There is a lot of deep snow in the passes so those trails are out.  So this morning my buddy and I headed up to Wallace Falls State Park.  We had both been there before -  I most recently had just been there last April.  Neither of us had a real desire to see the falls again so we decided instead to head up to Wallace Lake.

We were the first to arrive and we hit the Woody Trail just before 8 AM with an OAT of 34 deg F.  We headed up to the cut over to the Railroad Grade Trail which connects up to the Greg Ball Trail to Wallace Lake.  It was 1.6 miles of pretty easy hiking to get to the start of the Greg Ball Trail.  From there it was another 2.5 miles up to the lake.  It started out cold and rainy but as we climbed up the hill it turned to wet snowy slush and then ultimately into just dry snow.  It also got progressively deeper.  First a dusting, then an inch here and there, then 4 inches along the short section of DNR road on the GBT, and then ultimately 6-8 inches at the bottom of the lake.  The following pictures show the Greg Ball Trail just up to Wallace Lake.
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I decided to start my Christmas break out right with a quick cold hike up to Rattlesnake Ledge.  I just did this hike back in April so you can find more details on that blog post.  It's a pretty easy 4 mile round trip hike that climbs about 1100 feet up to a ledge overlooking Rattlesnake Lake.

What was cool today is that I took my 5 year old son with me.  We got started early with the temp in the mid-30's and it took us about 80 minutes to the ledge.  We only saw a few people on the way up but ended up seeing at least 50 people as we headed down later.

Despite the low temps we were bundled up well and had no problems staying warm.  I was really proud of A-man for getting up to the ledge and getting back down.  Hopefully this will be the start of many years of having him explore the outdoors with me.  

We had the ledge entirely to ourselves so I took the opportunity to explain to him the importance of taking careful steps and explained to him that a fall from the ledge would be extremely bad (which is an understatement).  We were having fun but safety had to come first and I was proud of him taking the situation very seriously.

It was very cloudy at the ledge.  We got just a couple of peaks of Mt. Si and Mailbox Peak as the clouds moved by to the north.  The top of Mount Washington was obscured by clouds as well.  I was really struck by how much water was missing from the lake compared to when I was there in April.  I also noticed that there was a new kiosk/sign with some information about the ledge and the area.

All in all in was a great morning.  The entire hike took less than 2 1/2 hours and could be done in considerably less time by anyone with longer legs than my son.

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This past weekend my buddy and I headed out for an end-of-summer backpacking trip on the east side of the North Cascades.  The short story is that it was a 3 day, 27 mile, extremely hot and extremely buggy trip that crossed 3 mountain passes while providing fantastic views and lots of varied terrain.  Also, it pretty much beat the hell out of myself and my buddy (who has what has to be a world record number of mosquito bites).

We started out on Thursday by visiting the Marblemount Ranger Station to get backcountry permits before driving over the North Cascades Highway (which is the most beautiful stretch of road I've ever experienced).  At Twisp we turned up the Twisp River Road and camped for the night at the South Creek Campground in preparation for an early Friday start.  The loop eventually would wind through Okanogan National Forest, Lake Chelan Sawtooth Wilderness, Lake Chelan National Recreation Area, and North Cascades National Park.
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Mt. Pilchuck 08/12/2011
 
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I spent this morning climbing up Mt. Pilchuck with a buddy of mine.  It's a 6 mile round trip climb with an elevation gain of about 2200 feet.  We thought this would be a quick hike but we ran into a lot of snow that really slowed us down.

To get to Mt. Pilchuck you follow you the Mountain Loop Highway east from Granite Falls and the turnoff is just past Verlot.

We got started on the trail around 7:45 AM.  It was a little later than we would have liked but we stopped to help someone who was having car trouble on the way.  We were the only people on the trail for a long time and were the first to the top.

The picture to the left is Mt. Baker from the top of Mt. Pilchuck.
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I'm going to attempt to make this short at sweet.  This hike is tough - in my opinion it's tougher than Mailbox Peak and it's not close.  I started my day early, arriving at the trail head at the school bus turn around point on Mt. Si Rd. at about 7 AM and hitting the trail soon after.
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