Gold Creek Trail to Alaska Lake, Gold Creek Pond Snowshoe — Sunday, Dec. 4, 2011

What a beautiful sunny day for a snowshoe hike. We had a late start so we headed to Snoqualmie and hiked up Gold Creek Trail. This is the trail that heads toward Alaska Lake. The temps were in the low 30’s. As we began our first snowshoe hike of the season, we could hear the crunching of the hard frozen snow beneath our snowshoes. We hiked up the road until road’s end at Heli’s Pond. Here we hiked around the pond, before continuing up the maintained groomed narrow trail. The trail climbs some along the base of the west side of Rampart Ridge. Scenary change as we left the road’s end in that we wandered through the trees , then into open spaces, and back into the trees. The groomed trail ended at Gold creek. Tracks continued up the creek, but this was our snack stop and turnaround point. On the return we took the loop around Gold Pond. The sun was setting, giving color to Rampart Ridge, and a reflection in the Pond. We hiked around 5 miles and gained just 600 feet in altitude. We did not have avalanche danger as we did not hike deep enough up the trail.