Gold Creek Trail to Alaska Lake, Gold Creek Pond & Joe Lake — Sunday, Jun. 9, 2024

Road: The half mile dirt road to Gold Pond parking lot has a lot of pot holes. The drive is slow but is only a half mile.

Toilets: The toilet was open but no toilet paper. There was no trash can so others left garbage on the floor. Many people going to Gold Pond are not hikers but are just going out for a picnic or short trip to be in nature.

Parking lot: The parking lot was full on this sunny, warm Sunday afternoon, as expected, but I did get a parking spot as someone else just pulled out.

Trail: We did not hike around Gold Pond as we wanted to find Rampart Falls which is along the trail going to Alaska and Joe Lakes. We hiked the first half mile along the Gold Pond Loop trail to the road heading to Heli’s Pond. Then we followed the road past many cabins for a mile, just stopping at Heli’s Pond for a few pictures.

At 1.6 miles from the car, we started on the Gold Creek trail. The trail leads thru woods and some rocky areas. At about another mile the trail touches Gold Creek but does not cross it. We sat for a few minutes at a log watching the creek flow. The trail was in pretty good shape until 3 miles from the car. At this point we started encountering a few downed trees, but none were too hard to get over. There were a couple log crossings over side creeks. One crossing freaked me out because the stream underneath was very loud going over the rocks. I had to scoot across, while my wife walked across.

At 3.7 miles from the car, Rampart Falls came into view. We could also look ahead on see Kendall’s Katwalk high up the mountain in front of us. We decided to see if we could get a better view by continuing up the trail for another quarter of a mile. The high brush was grown over the trail so we had to duck some and push our way thru. In this area there was one foot-bridge over a small creek that broke in the middle. We got our feet wet. We stopped at 4 miles from our car, where the trail had switch back up the hill and had some better or different views of the two ribbon falls dropping of the Ramparts.

Mud and water on trail: At times we were walking in water as it ran down the trail and we tried side stepping around muddy sections but with hiking boots these were not an issue to us.

Flowers: There were Trilliums galore along the trail. Normally Trilliums are white but here they were a variety of pinks, lavenders, etc., but seldom white. There was also an abundance of bleeding hearts, evergreen violets (they are yellow), miner’s lettuce (the candy flower did not have the peppermint strips that I expect to see), bluebells and a few other flowers. There are some still getting ready to bloom.

Comments: Our total hike was 7.9 miles with an elevation gain of less than 500 feet. We were pleasantly surprised at how nice this trail was.

More Information on this Trip Report

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