I went up to Coney Lake via the West Miller River Trail last weekend and hiked up Lennox Mt. It's a pretty trail that seems to be getting partially revived by a bunch of climbers and boulderers, but only up to the first mile.

The path was decent up to the turnoff to the old Coney Basin mine, but I missed the turnoff because it was so overgrown. I made the turnoff a bit more obvious by fixing the cairn.

The way up to the mine was in reasonably good shape (lots of blowdowns, but good otherwise). The way up to the lake from the mine trail was super difficult to follow; I was looking at my GPS app almost constantly since it was so overgrown. There were no decent trail markers after the spot where I got off trail until I got up to the lake. Definitely slid and fell on my butt a lot when I was going downhill since there were so many pine needles on the ground.

The mosquitos were annoying along the trail and horrible up near the lake.

The lake and the views were awesome.

We took a short hike on the first ~1.5 miles of this trail. Much of this portion of the trail (after the first 1/4 mile or so) has snow on it, but it is hard enough that no traction devices are needed. However, eventually the snow becomes deep enough that gaiters would be helpful.

Went out for an easy hike along the river to restart my hiking season.  The road was refreshingly well maintained.  Did not pay as much attention to the flowers as I usually do, but there were columbines, asters, and foxglove among several flowers seen.  Saw a garter snake and a western fence lizard on the trail.  Ripe berries were fairly plentiful - thimbleberries, huckleberries, and trailing dewberries.  The river felt good in the heat, but the flies were enough of an annoyance that we did not linger by the river.

I had heard that the trail was seldom used, but this day, it was surprisingly busy, with at least 3 other groups.  All of the other groups were out there for the bouldering.  According to one of the groups, the trail has 95 spots suitable for bouldering.  The 3 bouldering sites I surveyed had interesting, clean granite boulders.  I did not stop to climb, but the groups all seemed to be having a good time.

Well groomed trail along the river. We only went 1 mile in but had the trail all to ourselves. Gravel road for 3 miles has no potholes, which was nice.

A hiking friend and I had a great time hiking up to Coney Basin today via the West Fork Miller River Trail. This was my first time on this trail, and it was much more scenic than I imagined. Also, the trail was in better shape than I expected, though it's a little hard to tell if that was just because of snow covering up the brush.

ROAD: The Miller River Road is plowed all the way up to where the county road ends at the crossing of the West Fork Miller River. You don't need high clearance or snow tires to get to this point, though that may change with the big storm tonight. There is room for about three cars to park at the West Fork Miller River Trail (where the concrete barriers area), and room for another three cars just on the uphill side of the bridge over the West Fork Miller. Beyond this point, the road is not plowed and there appear to be some trees across it as well. But it would make for a good easy snowshoe destination since you can walk up the road toward Lake Dorothy.

SNOW: There is snow right from the start of the West Fork Miller River Trail, but there are also patches of bare dirt and rock here and there. Today the snow was firm enough that we didn't wear our snowshoes, but it was definitely getting softer in  the afternoon on the way back. We wore our spikes to get across a tricky section where the river washed out the old road (near picture #2), and kept them on for the sections above that, though they probably weren't really needed except for that one spot. I would definitely recommend bringing spikes, poles, gaiters, and showshoes for any adventure up this trail since it's hard to predict the conditions based on what you see at the road.

ROUTE: We followed the old west fork road along the river for about 2.5 miles easily - no real route-finding is required for this part. It's generally a pretty gentle grade, but with the current snow conditions you will find yourself climbing up and down a fair amount. At about 2.5 miles when the trail starts to drop a bit, we turned onto the Coney Basin Trail. It's very easy to miss this turnoff - look for a huge log that spans a small creek bed coming down from the right. There is also a rusted culvert to the right of the big log. If you look carefully from below, you can see the level of the old Coney Basin road ascending away from the river. Once you're on it, it's fairly easy to follow, at least in the bottom part.

This road gets less and less road like the higher you go, especially with snow covering everything. There are trees growing right in the road bed, along with places where it's basically just a large creek and you have to either walk on loose rocks or water in the middle, or try to stay on the deep snow on one side or the other. A GPS definitely helps to keep you on track. When we got to the switchback in the road, we took a shortcut through the woods instead, which worked well. Honestly, the shortcut was more open than the road at this point! A nice side bonus is that there's a really cool waterfall on Coney Creek next to the shortcut, about 2/3 of the way up.

In the upper section above the switchback, the road is all but unrecognizable, though we were still able to follow it OK. The fact that someone else had gone up there in the last few days definitely helped, as we mainly followed their tracks.

The basin itself is really cool, but we didn't go too far into it. The bottom of the basin seems littered with massive boulders and equally massive logs, with the whole mess being mostly but not entirely covered with about 6' of snow. It's sort of possible to thread a path through all of this on top of the snow, but if you fell through something you'd be (literally) in over your head!

STATS / SUMMARY: This was about 8.5 miles with roughly 1500' of elevation gain. It took us just over 3:00 to reach the basin, and wasn't much faster on the way down with all the sightseeing.

I recommend this trail as an easy or moderate snowshoe or winter hike. It's very approachable and has some lovely scenery throughout. There is only one slightly sketchy section that is only maybe 100' long. I do recommend you have a GPS handy, with this trail loaded onto it, as the trail can be hard to find if the existing tracks are snowed over.