Snoqualmie Lake, Taylor River - Otter Falls & Lake Dorothy - Lake Bear - Lake Deer — Saturday, May. 7, 2016

Snoqualmie Region > North Bend Area

Took advantage of amazing day to do a new bike&hike. Taylor River trail is one of the few trails that allow bike riding and has the bonus of getting you to the edge of Alpine Lakes Wilderness with two trails to choose from. Official trailhead parking lot has three significant washouts that only high clearance vehicles bothered to attempt, but reasonable amount of parking at the turn in the road past the bridge. Three or so parties of campers in the first mile along the trail. Trail is generally uneventful until Otter Falls creek crossing. Various people could not find the turn for Otter Falls. There is no signed trail, just a bunch of random way trails right after the washed out creek crossing. The trail gets much less use after the falls and lots of salmonberry growing in tight gives the arms and legs lots of scratches. The trees across the trail started getting worse around mile 4. I counted 56 significant tree obstructions that I had to carry my bike over/around/through before getting to the Snoqualmie Nordom trail junction. Trail is often rough stream bed with lots of rocks making for some challenging pedaling. Starting the Snoqualmie lake hike I immediately was hit with many more large tree obstructions in the trail. I counted 35 more blocking trees in the first mile or so of climbing. This made the 2 miles to the lake go much slower than normal. Snow patches start just at the lake and rapidly cover most of the trail as soon as you round the shore to climb to the next lakes. Lake is 90% snow covered. I saw two decent campsites that were clear and both were occupied. I kept on the snow patches up to Deer and Bear lakes. I am rather light and with smart foot placement, I only postholed a few times. Deer and Bear are completely snow covered. I noticed all of the streams for water have a significant amount of foam on the surface. I hesitantly drank some filtered water from them anyway. Perhaps early season snowmelt has some sort of protein or algae contributing to this. I climbed to the ridge that crests above Lake Dorothy and set off to the West to climb a granite knob for open views above the trees. A truly spectacular viewpoint all around and down across the big lake below with many islands. Pollen swirls were visible on the lake 800' below. A grouse was calling very close to me but I could not locate where he was hiding. Took 5 hours to get here. Turned around and headed back to the 91 tree crossings. 4 hours back the 11 miles.