Monogram Lake — Tuesday, May. 15, 2018

Attempted to hike to Monogram Lake with my buddy; turned around about 4400 ft elevation not far past the North Cascades NP boundary.  Only a couple trees down across the switchbacks prior to the creek crossing and that's where it got messy.  Massive tree blown down forces the first departure from the trail, and it's difficult or dangerous to follow the trail from there on out due to falling through snow due to meltwater beneath.  Be careful of bridge crossings; they've melted partially out and you can fall a few feet through what you thought was solid snow.  We had microspikes and GPS and used the GPS fairly extensively; snowshoes wouldn't have helped on this hike had we brought them.  There was approx 4 feet of snow at our turnaround, and we still had 1k feet of elevation gain to the ridge you must crest before descending to Monogram lake, so we called it there.