LAKE TWENTYTWO

6-28-2012
Mountain Highway Loop
Granite Falls to Arlington

At some point driving to Granite Falls, I had to say that road work in here is as bad as in Michigan. Hard to say. We took smaller roads going to the mountains, so it was somewhat nicer then freeway, but as well worse with the construction. There is a lot of street / road stands with fireworks around here. Half way to the Granite Falls we started to see snowy mountains on the horizon. After almost an hour we stopped at the visitor center and got some maps there.

We were as well told, that there might be few people, because it is really nice day. Compared to the rest of country, it is around mid 60's (maybe 70) for the high. Really nice. Our plan was to drive on the Mountain Highway to Arlington. The only firm point was hike to Lake Twentytwo. The rest ... who knows. The trail was just few miles away from the center.

There was quite a few people already hiking. We saw some people getting ready (some stretching, getting backpacks and water) and I thought it was kind of funny. You know ... so much monkey business for 5 miles. The map we got from the visitor center had list of all trails, it included elevation gain as well. We were going to hike 2.6 miles with elevation gain of 1500 feet (one way). Hard to imagine how it is going to look like. The beginning of the trail looked really great. Old trees, mossy death trees, creek ... and trail. We started to walk and it was .... (surprise) uphill. We both were thinking it was really close to the beauty of Olympic forest. Kind of hard to describe (or take a photo) without actually being there. At one point we walked on the rocks outside of the forest. We got some sunshine (too hot) and as well some nice views.

And ... it was taking forever to get to the lake. When I read some stuff about this area, they were mentioning snow, but I thought it was just crazy. Then we met some people going back to the trail head and they said there is a bit of snow on the trail. Really? And then we started to see small areas of snow. I even made a snowball and named it "snowball":

And then:

Just crazy. The lake was relatively small, but the hills around and all that snow ... it was more then impressive. We were falling into the snowbanks, big parts of the trail around the lake were still covered with the snow. Just crazy (it is almost beginning of July). We tried to walk around the lake as far as we could, but at some point it just looked too dangerous, so we gave up. For a while we enjoy the view and spirit of the Lake Twentytwo. On the way back we were throwing snowballs at each other (and then snow was gone). It took over three hours to hike there and back. And it was nice to see spring just starting to come:

We wanted to stop by few short trails, but they were closed, so we just kept driving. Nice forest all around, many campgrounds (most of them still closed). For 14 miles we had to drive on gravel road (not too much fun). Some nice views but not short trail, so we just kept going. We stopped by one trail, but it was not very interesting and there was too many bugs.
At that point it was kind of late, so we decided to drive home.

(Our possible destinations. Short descriptions of Lake Twentytwo trail.)

(Trails of the Mountain Highway Loop, map from visitor center.)

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