The original plan was to go tackle Mount Adams this weekend, but mother nature was not being co-operative in all possible ways. The weather was beautiful, but apparently we haven’t had enough good weather to melt the snow, so we couldn’t even get within 4 miles of the trailhead at Adams. The group we were going to go with kept shrinking, and the inability to get to the trail has forced us to postpone the adventure.
I was still ready to go somewhere, so Joe and I decided we’d return to our nemesis Eagle Lake. Eagle Lake may sound familiar, and that’s because Joe and I tried to get there before and failed due to the weather and lack of trail, and I lost my watch. Well…we still didn’t find the trail going up to Eagle Lake, we stuck close to the water that was coming down, and after a grueling three and a half hours of bushwhacking, bouldering, scrambling and hiking through snow, we arrived at our destination! We set up camp and slept on the snow. The next day we did some hiking around the Lake in the beautiful sunshine. Our goal completed, we packed it all up, came back down the mountain (using the actual trail!) and it only took us an hour and twenty minutes. It’s amazing how much a trail can make a difference.

We stopped at Barclay Lake and grabbed a few quick photos. It was much more beautiful than the last time we were here in the rain.

You’ll notice that there is no trail around here, but there were a bunch of waterfalls as we hiked alongside the water in our attempt to find Eagle Lake.

Once again, no sign of a trail, though I will admit the views were spectacular.

When we finally reached Eagle Lake we were greeted with this beautiful view. Almost the entire lake was iced over, but there was just enough visible to get my favorite photo from the trip of the reflection of Merchant Peak.

This is where we called home for the night.

On our trek up towards Mount Townsend, I stopped and snapped a shot of Eagle Lake below us. You can see the outline of the lake where the edges are starting to melt.

I really liked the contrast of this photo, with the snow on the left side, and the bare scrub and rocks on the right.

Here is the path we ended up hiking back down from Mount Townsend. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out where we walked…since I’m not sure myself. It was steep, snowy, I punched through a couple different times, took a few unwanted slides down, but eventually I made it with only minor scratches.