<< Winter Trails in Olympic National Park

02/19/06 - Icy Waters on the Lake Angeles Trail

It's been cold the last few days, at least by local standards. The temperatures has been down in the low 20s towards sea level, and much colder up on Hurricane Ridge. But, today the cold snap seems to have broken, and the sky is full of milky clouds. We went out to stretch our legs on the Lake Angeles Trail, though we had no intention of climbing 2400' to the lake.

The trail itself was hard and dry. We haven't had any rain lately, but the ground seems both friable and frozen. We dodged a few fallen trees and some black ice along the way to the rude bridge that arches the stream up at the first campground. We were rewarded with a great view of ice and moving water. It's a bit hard to tell the white ice hanging from the rocks and logs from the whiteness of the running water, but if you look carefully, you can see the icicles hanging from the log, that used to be the old bridge, in the lower picture, and you can see the ice patches clinging to the mossy rocks and looking much like ctenaphores in the upper one.

There were lots of people out checking out the trail. We aren't sure if any of them made it all the way up to Lake Angeles. We know that there is a fallen tree that fills most of the trough of the trail up around 900' above the parking lot, but you can walk alongside it if you watch your footing. Eventually, we'll make our way up to the high country, but the cold, and particularly our fear of ice, have been holding us back.

Keywords: lake angeles, high country, hurricane ridge