Snow Lake
Distance: 7.2 miles, roundtrip
Difficulty: Easy
Fees: Northwest Forest Pass or National Parks Pass
View my Gaia GPS track here
It’s been about a month since I last spent a significant time outdoors. October was a stressful month for me in so many ways, so I was grateful to be able to have a chance to spend some much needed time outdoors again.
My friend Shelby came to visit me for a long weekend from Portland. Shelby was my main bae climbing partner when I was living in Portland and is a pro at making me push my limits.
It’s been getting colder and rainier lately, so we knew climbing outdoors would most likely not happen so we found ourselves on Saturday morning gearing up for a short day hike to the least rainy place we could think of that was nearby.
I’d heard so much about Snow Lake before but had still never been. It had received a fresh dusting of fluffy powdery snow and was still a few weeks before we’d need to be concerned about any avalanche danger.
For the first bit of the trail, we didn’t encounter many other hikers. It was an absolutely peaceful winter wonderland – it was hard to keep myself from flopping into every bit of untouched powder we came across.
When we arrived at the lake, it was largely shrouded in a cloud but beautiful, nonetheless. We didn’t stay very long at the lake because it was getting cold and a bit windy so we turned around after a quick minute of snapping photos.