"Trail snow covered at times" and "gear and expertise recommended" are both somewhat inaccurate - the trail is entirely snow, with not a bit of bare ground to be seen, and you could walk it in boots if you're comfortable on slopes. It's either groomed or really well traversed with skis and snowshoes, so it's compact enough I didn't leave more than small divots. I used microspikes, which I'd recommend; my husband used snowshoes but they weren't necessary. It was icy on one stretch under the trees, but mostly just crunchy.
We didn't realize there was a turn-off before the first lake to get to the upper lakes and wound up continuing on to Summit Lake. Note that there are dire warning signs about avalanche control at 1.1mi from the parking lot that I wouldn't have walked past if nwac.us had showed anything more than the 1-green it had today (never seen all areas green in January!). With this route, we registered 2.85mi, with 624' of total elevation, which took us 2h15m. We couldn't see the lake that was downhill from the trail because of trees in the way (and there's no good way to walk that way as it's a steep dropoff).
The two lakes we saw were covered with snow, so you couldn't see the frozen lake surface. We were concerned to see numerous ski tracks across the lakes, which may well not be frozen thick enough to support a person's weight.
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