Tank Lakes, East Fork Foss - Necklace Valley — Saturday, Aug. 23, 2025

I first hiked the Necklace Valley trail eight years ago and remembered it being tough — eight years later, I still think it’s a pretty tough hike!

We got to the trailhead around 10:30 a.m. and the (small) lot was already overflowing so we parked just a bit up the road. The first 4.5 miles of trail ramble along the river and are is in nice shape overall. Once you cross the river though… it gets really root-y and rocky. I spent a lot of this trail staring at my feet and trying not to trip. The grade is steeeep and many sections involve lunging up boulders as tall as my hips. Temps were well into the 80s during our ascent which made it all the more brutal.

Once you get the valley, there’s a slight reprieve as it flattens out and travels through fields of delicious blueberries.

This visit, we continued on past the valley and up to Tank Lakes. It’s another mile or so of rock-hopping uphill with a loosely defined ‘trail’ and sporadic carins. It was not actually as bad as it looked on the map aside from the oppressively hot sun.

The Tank Lakes area is absolutely stunning. We were a bit worried about crowds, but there is so much room to spread out that it was not an issue at all. We ran into quite a few groups hiking the full Alpine Lake High Route. Had one of the best sunsets I’ve seen on trail.

The descent the next day was a bit of a slog in the heat, but definitely went a lot faster than the way up. We unfortunately didn’t make it out early enough to beat the Hwy 2 traffic westbound, but overall worth it!