Packwood Lake — Friday, May. 17, 2002

South Cascades > Goat Rocks

I hiked the service road into Packwood Lake, once the route of a narrow gauge railroad into the lake around the turn of the 20th C. when developers hoped that they would be major supplier of electricity to Tacoma. It never worked out that way, although for years there was a resort of sort on lake until about the middle of the last decade. At any rate, the service road-it's barely wide enough for 4 wheelers is about a mile less than the NFS trail into the lake, about 3.7 miles to the lake. There was a good deal of snow on the road about half way in, the road is roughly about the elevation of the lake, around 3000 feet. The trail around the lake, the Upper Lake creek trail is snow free around the lake but once it starts up away from he lake, it is snow covered. I talked to some guys who slogged in on the NFS trail and they said it was amost completely under snow, some of it deep. I like to fish at the upper end of the lake, where the creeks enter the lake, and did a fair job, catching a limit of trout--nothing extraordinary. No bait is allowed in the lake, and you have to use a single barbless hook--and fish must be over 10 inches in length. It's about two miles by trail to the upper end of the lake-5-6 rafts were on the lake during the day, a much shorter way to reach the upper end. Packwood Lake is a large and beautiful, steep forested ridges tower above the Lake, Johnson Peak looms over the southern end of the lake, and when fishing at the south end of the lake, you get an interesting view of Rainier towering over the Tatoosh Range. Over the course of this weekend and the next, the snow on the forest service road will be beaten down making for easier walking. There are many excellent campsites all along the lake, I particulalry reccomend the ones toward the upper end, spectacular views of the lake, good access to fishing form the bank, fewer people, and yet protected under the canopy of a grove of huge cedars and firs.