Hiked this on Saturday with five friends as our longest-ever day hike and had a great time!! Saw several other hikers doing the same thing. We car camped on Friday night at Fairholm Campground (all first-come, first-serve sites about 30 minutes from the trailhead) and were on the trail by 7:15AM Saturday morning.
(Side note - If you want to find a first-come, first-serve campsite near this trail on a Friday morning DEFINITELY get there early! We left Seattle at 5:45AM and arrived at Fairholm around 9:00AM. We saw five different sites leaving and every single one already had someone else waiting for their site. We drove over to Sol Duc to check out their 20ish FCFS sites at 9:20 - two and a half hours before the official checkout time - and everything had already been claimed. We went back to Fairholm around 10:00 and just happened to catch a site but it was slim pickings!!)
Road in is paved all the way, trailhead parking lot is huge (and had plenty of empty spots at 7:15 on Saturday), and bathrooms all along the trail were in good condition. Plenty of water along the trail right now - the longest dry stretch is about 5 miles between Deer Lake and Heart Lake, but even then there were some trickles you could probably use if desperate. Most of us carried two liters and filtered just downstream of the Heart Lake campsite and that seemed to be the perfect amount!
Snow is almost completely gone from the trail - you will spend at most 90 seconds walking across slush, no traction needed. There is one small section where a mini-glissade will make your life much easier!
Wildflowers are out in abundance, and unfortunately the mosquitos, gnats, and black flies are too. I am only marking bugs as "an annoyance" and not "terrible" because there were parts of the trail that were mostly bug-free.
Views were incredible! We loved seeing Blue Glacier and Mount Olympus from a different angle after having backpacked that trail last summer. Also encountered a mountain goat with her baby at a river crossing near the 12 mile mark (and of course kept a respectable distance from both!)
We did not end up doing the side trip up Burroughs Mountain or down into Lunch Lake. Without these, our fitness trackers clocked the whole thing at around 17.5 miles and 5,000 elevation gain. We finished in 10 hours and 59 minutes, which included time for multiple stretch breaks, photos, food, water filtering, and using the bathroom. Stayed another night at Fairholm Saturday night and enjoyed soaking our tired feet in Lake Crescent while having a post-hike beer!
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