The trail was a little difficult to find. It is across the river, and there is parking for maybe 5 cars at the river. The river crossing, at the time, was slow flowing and maybe 6-12 inches deep. It was cold but crossable. It seems like this trail is not often travelled, and mostly travelled by dirt bikes. At times the path is narrow, other times very close to a cliff so caution is advised. There were a few downed trees but easily maneuvered around. There is another creek crossing at 1.5 miles in, and it is a smaller crossing, however deeper and faster flowing. My dog wasn’t into it so we turned around. I will be coming back to see those meadows!

The ford at the start was knee high but pretty doable, a few smaller downed trees but easy to navigate. Pretty uneventful until you hit the juniper ridge junction. That trail from there has been throughly ripped to hell by dirtbikes, but is still pretty passable. When we got to the turns, we found the skeeters. I took a swat with my hand that caught more than a dozen, there were literal clouds. A few sprays of bug dope and they mostly run off, but holy hell did they give us a whooping before that. Pretty nice views of dark mountain and the tarns were looking like the just recently melted out.

The dirtbike trail goes directly through a bunch of headwaters streams that have a good population of frogs and aquatic insects, not sure who figured that to be a good idea. 

We started our trip at the White Pass Campground at the east end of Leech Lake. There were five cars at the north PCT trailhead parking with space for a few more when we arrived about 10am on a sunny Saturday. 

We hiked about a mile to the first intersection with the Dark Meadows trail.  Most of the snow that had fallen in the previous days had melted so the trail was muddy in places. There was one small blowdown pretty close to the beginning of the trail that spanned both sides of a switchback. People are cutting the switchback and making a mess of this area. Further up the trail there was a bench that PCT thru hikers had signed with their trail names. 

The Dark Meadows trail was covered with some snow but quickly melting out and easy to follow. Most of the snow was near the intersection with the PCT. On the Dark Meadows trail there was one large blowdown that took more substantial effort to step over, at least to knee height. Having read previous trip reports on the Dark Meadows trail, I do agree that generally this trail is pretty flat but also has some steeper parts as you descend several terraces on your way to Dog Lake. There's not much to look at through this two mile section of open forest ramble but you do get a couple peek-a-boos of Spiral Butte as you get closer to the lake. The second mile of this trail has most of the terraces. There were two steeper descents in this section that need some tread improvement. Lots of really thick loose dirt and large sections of rock on one and the other was a narrow compact rut in the ground with loose rocks. Nothing that was hard to cover but a little love would improve the trail conditions in those places.

We joined the Cramer Lake trail and hiked towards Dog Lake. The campground was closed and barricaded by dumpsters to keep cars out but that didn't seem to help because people had moved them apart just enough to allow cars into the campground. When we arrived we had the campground to ourselves and enjoyed the scenery. My friend's dog enjoyed playing in the water. When we had our fill we walked along a trail beside the lake to the end of it and then further along the road to the scenic overlook 1/4 mile away. The waterfall there was beautiful. We had our lunch at the overlook in the sun at a picnic table then retraced our route. All in all about 7.5 miles of wandering in about 4.5 hours including a lunch break.    

So, we hiked to Dark Meadow using the description in Dan Nelson's Day Hiking South Cascades, 2007. This guide uses a different start point from the Dark Meadow trail #263, which starts on FR 23 and crosses East Canyon Creek; rather, it starts on a bootpath off a road marked 2325, which meets the Boundary Trail shortly before it crosses Dark Creek. At the GPS point given in the book, we found no obvious bootpath, just a few sporadic game trails. We searched for about a quarter mile in either direction before deciding to just bushwhack up the slope and make our own way up. At around 4300 ft, we hit a well-maintained, established trail not shown on the Gaia map, that we followed to the Boundary Trail---not what I'd call a bootpath, so I can only assume there has been development since the book was written. On the way back, we followed this established trail to its beginning on FR 2325, about half a mile northeast of where we parked; it's apparently not obvious enough for us to have noticed driving in, oops. The coordinates of the point I dropped when we reached the trailhead are 46.27919, -121.73872.

From there, navigation is quite easy, and the only challenge is the incredibly dusty condition the Boundary Trail is in from motorized traffic, and the lack of water along the route. Dark Creek is dry. We found two muddy puddles that seem to be from underground springs, but no other water on the trail or in the meadows. We turned around where the Boundary Trail starts to curve away from the meadows on the side of Dark Mountain, and went back to the fork with the Juniper Ridge trail to explore the meadows in that direction. Two motorbikes, no hiker traffic at all. The views of Adams from the higher meadows were hazy, but pretty good, though the meadows probably looked nicer a few weeks ago. The highlight of the day was the sheer quantity of perfect, powder-blue huckleberries, as far as the eye could see. A lump of berry-filled bear scat, and the fluttering of some thrushes in the bushes suggests we weren't the only partakers, but perhaps we were the only human (and canine?) ones on this day.

Our track was closer to 1400 ft and 7 miles for this little excursion. Interesting area.