We hiked through the "backdoor" behind Lillian Lake that leads up to Rampart Ridge/Lakes and summited Alta Mountain -- I'll start with stats: My watch tracked us at about 17 miles and 7200ft of elevation gain overall. Took us about 12hours total, I moved slow on the way back. We did head down to Margaret Lake, so without that detour it'd be closer to 16.5 miles and 6900ft of gain.
Day 1: Had a friend visiting in town and spent the day climbing at the exits, so we started our hike to Margaret Lake at 10pm and arrived around midnight, there is some snow heading down to the lake, easily passable, but made navigation a little tricky especially at night and with headlamps. We had to cross a little pond/swamp that is in the middle of the trail using some sticks/logs in the way, was quite engaging for something we were doing 15 minutes before bed. The areas right by the lake are muddy and not suitable for camping, but we found some spots about 200ft up that were flat and great.
Day 2: Started the day later at around 7am -- packed up our stuff, and headed back up to the fork area, we dropped some of our stuff here and made our way to Lake Lillian. From waking up to the end of this day there were mosquitoes.
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On the way to Lake Lillian there aren't many obstacles, at times the trail is overgrown, and the descent can be a bit steep in sections. From this point on, every descent/ascent felt more like a climbers trail to me than your typical hiking trail.
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At Lake Lillian (beautiful lake!) we found some snow, and had no clue what the proper way to the backdoor was, we ended up doing a bit of scrambling up a slab rock wall and eventually found a trail that lead us to the steepest climb of the day up the backdoor. This climb has loose rock on it, is a very steep grade, but is short. Again, a climbers trail that is quite steep and rough/rugged.
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The hike over to Rampart Ridge follows the same pattern, head down into a valley, then climb out of that valley up a steep trail (that again, was easy to veer off of and hard to navigate around). There's great creeks along the way on this portion to fill water up with (very grateful for this!). Descending Rampart Ridge to Rampart Lakes involved the most snow -- we didn't have spikes or anything and felt secure, but I saw several people moving much slower and being deliberate with their footing on the way down (and later up) this section. Once you get to the lakes, it's a beautiful spot and I definitely would love to come back to camp here. Water is cold and refreshing, great for the cold plungers, good spot to have lunch if you brought it.
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From here we made our way towards the trail marked as Lila Lake, there's a turn left at some point in this trail that takes you up to the Alta Mountain climbers trail -- we missed this and had to bushwhack up a ridge to make it to a later section of that trail. From here, the trail is very exposed to sun and is along a ridgeline. I'm a baby when it comes to heights and ended up being fine all the way to the summit, but it was definitely scary and slow moving for me. The summit is beautiful and well worth the difficulty.
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Overall: The ups and downs were much steeper than I anticipated. As mentioned before, I'd consider them climbers trails and they were brutal, especially on the way back when morale was low due to bugs and a bit of bonking. Poles are useful, glad I had mine! My friend, who is much fitter than me, was fine without them though.
Navigation was difficult and I had a gps track downloaded (so either I'm bad at navigation or things are difficult to find, take what you will from that).
We anticipated this hike was much easier than expected because of a previous trip report (my fault, should've done more research) and the distance and gain was considerably higher than what was reported for us. In hindsight, we would've brought more food and ensured we didn't forget vital things like our sun hoody and glasses in the car (again, our fault).
The bugs, oh man the bugs, they were horrible. We were bitten by mosquitoes from the moment we started hiking until the very end when we were descending back from the Margaret Lake fork. Bring bug protection. I have well over 100 mosquito bites...
Quite an unexpected adventure.
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