[Steve]

As my car has rather low ground clearance I decided to take the long approach to the trailhead rather than the more direct route taking road 6100. We drove eagle creek road from Leavenworth to the end and took a left onto the FS road (7500 I believe) for six miles. The dirt road is in good condition, but very dusty. At the end of the road the road splits and you take a left onto road 5200 for many miles until the end. There are several dips in the road and my car bottomed out a couple times both in and out. The road is very narrow for the last five miles or so and I don't know what I would do if we had encountered a car coming from the opposite direction. At the end of the road is a large parking area and a narrow road on the right side that takes you down to another parking area and the TH for mad river. The trail is very well maintained and well built, but what must have been $$$ was spent for the benefit of motorcyclists. The trail system is marked as being closed for the season but it was apparent from the fresh tracks that they have been using it anyway tearing up some sections of the trail. We were originally going to go up the Jimmy creek trail but could not find it. Apparently it is located near the rock field a couple hundred yards from the mad river bridge. As I had my kids with me we made it an easy day the first day and hiked up to the blue meadow. It really is not much of a meadow and there really are no camp spots. It would have been better to take the trail up to whistling pig and take the nice camp spot at the intersection with tommy ridge/whistling pig trail. Bugs are not bad, mozzies only and they are not too vicious but I did get several bites, but I also used no DEET. The next day we hiked down from Blue Creek Meadow and took the trail up to the whistling pig intersection. We continued on going to Cougar mountain. At the intersection of the main trail with the cougar mountain summit trail is a very nice camp site just off the summit trail. We took some time to hike up the summit trail and get some great views of the mountain ranges on the west and east side. My 8 year old had fun taking pictures of us and the scenery. This would have been a good place to stop but we continued on. Not far beyond this is the interestion for the cougar mountain trail and the split for the Jimmy Creek trail and the unmaintained (NM) trail. We searched for the Jimmy Creek trail using the GPS to measure the distance to the TH. The sign at the fork says 1/4 mile and the green trail map says .3 mile but nowhere could I find the trail and there was no sign for it. We took the NM trail; note, I should have backed up to the intersection and just SE to try and hit the trail somewhere down the mountain. We continued down the NM trail up the the next hill top (elev ~6358') and that is where I lost the trail. So we bushwacked down the mountain making for the mad river trail. For the most part it was easy and not overgrown at all. Some places were very steep. We eventually rejoined the NM trail and came down to the mad river trail 1.9 miles from the mad river bridge. This made the trip longer than anticipated. Not far from the intersection we broke out the snacks and I left my ziploc bag of my sweetwater filter accessories along the side of the trail, which I did not discover until we went to get water under the mad river bridge. We managed to get back to the TH at 6pm. 8.7 miles in one day was more than I thought the kids could handle but with lots of Nature's Vallye granola bars, some corn nuts, water and a promise of Dairy Queen blizzard's the trip went quite well. Overall I enjoyed the trip, but would never want to do it once it is opened to the cyclists. The 1.5 hours it took both ways from Leavenworth does not really make worth going. Perhaps if I could have taken the short road from near lake Wenatchee it would have been better, but my car could never make that road.