Nice rainy day hike today with Ken and Wendy Mallit, Mark, David, and Carl.
This hike is outside our usual Snoqualmie/Issaquah Alps area. It is farther north and east, off Highway 2, near Gold Bar.
This trail is amazingly popular. Even today, a totally rainy day, saw tons of people on the first part of the trail, and a full parking lot (and this lot is large) when we got back about 11:30 or so.
Most of the people are going to Wallace Falls. If you look at the GPS track:
http://adventures.garmin.com/en-US/by/djhiker/wallace-lake-4-1-2017/#.WOASIk2Qypp
You can see that about 1.5 miles from the trail head the trail splits. We took the Greg Ball Trail and went to the lake. This trail was almost empty. But the falls are magnificent and the hike is fairly easy, so there are hundreds of people on the trail. A nice hike to try on a rainy week day.
Just over 8 miles, 2K elevation gain, 3.5 hours, a good workout to a beautiful sub-alpine lake.