[ALW Hiker]

Long-time lurker here, first time poster! First off, I'd like to say thanks to all the hikers and climbers who have made this site such an incredible resource. I'm on a mission to visit all the lakes in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, and have gleaned tons of valuable info on routes and destinations from these pages. On a very summer-like day yesterday, I visited Dingford Creek with a new hiking friend. I'd been to Hester, Horseshoe, and Goat Lakes last year, but this was my first hike up the Myrtle Lake fork. I'm looking forward to going back for the other two "Arthurian Lakes", plus several of the other lakes around Myrtle. I'll probably do this as a multi-night backpack later in the season. The Dingford Creek Road was pretty much the usual. We made it OK in my Subaru Forester, but most of the vehicles at the trailhead (about a dozen) were trucks. Some of the spots in the road seemed a little trickier than usual, though the two rocky washout areas seemed to have seen a bit of work to improve passage. Our original plan was to hike toward Myrtle Lake, then head north up Nimue Creek to Nimue, Le Fay and Merlin Lakes. At the trailhead, we decided to visit Myrtle first, then based on conditions try for Merlin and the others.

The main fork of Goat Creek was a bit spicy, but the log someone placed there works fine.

One of about 7 huge blowdowns between the Hester Junction and Myrtle Lake. We cleaned up the branches on most of them but ran out of steam on a couple.

Crossing one of the many fork of Nimue Creek. It's interesting how both Nimue and Goat Creek are widely braided across the trail - must be something about the rocks or terrain in the area.

After about three hours of hiking, we reached Myrtle Lake. This was my first time here, so I wasn't sure what kind of views we'd see at the lake, but they're pretty great! Big Snow looms very large to the SE, and it was interesting to see Little Bulger and the Shark Fin (is that the right name?) from the south. I was just at Lake Dorothy five days before and saw them from the north.

Myrtle Lake and Little Bulger

Myrtle and Big Snow Mtn

Myrtle Lake is still mostly frozen over, with 2-3' of snow around the lake. After stopping for photos and lunch, we liked the firm snow conditions, and headed uphill toward Merlin Lake. On the way up we encountered quite a few hills and gullies not on the topo, and strayed a bit too far south. Many areas were fully melted out, and we dealt with some mild brush, but nothing too steep. We tried to stay on snow "bands" where we could, and eventually made it to the wide drainage leading to the Merlin inlet, after plunging down some steep snow next to a pond.

Snow bands

Merlin pond

We reached Merlin Lake in about 45 minutes. The inlet area of Merlin is pretty marsh-like, but there was enough snow on most of it to make travel easy. The lake is almost entirely snow-covered. I rescued a helium balloon from the Merlin inlet - it seems I find one of these at almost every off-trail lake I go to!

Merlin and Sorcery Mtn

Me at Merlin

Marshy inlet

Me and Eric

Balloon I plucked from the Merlin inlet

On the route back, we decided to stay more north, following the flattish terrain leading to the inlet. For the most part this worked well, and we stayed on snow most of the time. Some holes to avoid, but not bad. We hoped we'd be able to stay on snow all the way back to Myrtle, but it was not to be. As we got to the steeper slopes directly west of Myrtle, the snow disappeared and we had to fight our way through some brush and old logs, with the occasional veggie belay. Fortunately, that part only took about 10 minutes, and we were back on snow at the west shore of Myrtle, about 35 minutes after leaving Merlin.

Easier terrain on the northern route

Rocks melting snow

Myrtle Lake in sight

Awesome Big Snow views from the west shore

Looking toward Little Myrtle and pass to Lake Dorothy

Big Snow

The way back was long but uneventful. Reached the car about 8:23 after we started. About 13 miles and 3000' of gain, give or take! We only saw two other hikers below the junction, who had spent the night near Myrtle Lake. They warned us not to attempt Hester Lake, as the Dingford Creek crossing is impassable.

Maidenhair below Pumpkinseed Falls

[Roly Poly]

Excellent report! A tough 13 miles in the heat! So that log crossing was a little tricky?

[Bluebird]

I have a similar goal, about 185 lakes visited so far and no idea of how many I have left!

[Type E]

Fun area! Great now I have to count how many I have gone to and have another list to fill E

[RichP]

Welcome over here. I've seen your reports on WTA. Do you know how many lakes there are in the ALW? Probably with all the tanks, pots and tarns I'd imagine in the 100's!

[ALW Hiker]

[Kim Brown]

Neat goal for sure; How far into your goal are you!

[ALW Hiker]

[Backpacker Joe]

Its been years since I was there. Nice to "See" it again. Thanks.

[puzzlr]

I've never been to Merlin or Nimue lakes -- you inspire me to think about getting up there this summer. I don't mind brush in the unlogged areas so much as long as there isn't Devil's Club involved. But that grows mostly in the creek beds. This is not directly comparable because only part of it is the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, but over the years I've been marking every lake, pond, tarn, etc that I see on Google Earth and in person within the boundaries of the Middle Fork watershed. I think I've got most of them now but every once in a while I spot another small unnamed one while trip planning. I've got 121 named lakes (official and informal names) and 258 unnamed "lakes" for this area. It's interesting that there are lakes all over most of the area but very few near North Bend. The lake has to drain into the Middle Fork to count so ones like Crater and Rachor on the north side of Si don't count.

BTW, I've got a two volume set of Lakes Of Washington that I'd like to find a new home for. If you're interested, PM me and we'll figure out how to get them to you.

[Bramble_Scramble]

[ALW Hiker]

Thanks puzzlr, that's a really interesting map you have of the Middle Fork Lakes. It's amazing how many there are, especially when you start looking at the unnamed ones. What program are you using to draw that map? It seems that some of the named lakes are not showing but maybe that's just a display/zoom issue. The informal names are especially fun to know - I see some on there that I've never heard of, e.g. "Blackwater Lake" - behind the Hardscrabble Horse Camp? I have the officially named ones that are part of the ALW in a spreadsheet - I'll attach it below in case people are interested. I do see a few that aren't shown on your map, so maybe my list will be helpful to you. Named ALW lakes: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DXpeBOuzL3GWc-6L3-yLZ7Z1aGRWmHoV/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=105157172090315618927&rtpof=true&sd=true We didn't see much Devil's Club on our route to Merlin, but a lot of it was under snow so it's hard to say for certain. I suspect there might be more brush if you followed the creek route up to Nimue.

[puzzlr]

That map is Google Earth with Placemarks on the lakes. I didn't mean for it to be readable at that zoom level, just leave the impression of a lot of lakes. That's a fun list. It looks like the color coding is based on the elevation. Yes, Blackwater is what the local crystal miners call the small lake near Hardscrabble Creek, above the horse camp. I've been all around there but never close enough to see the actual lake. I don't think it's very pretty. Bramble_Scramble, thanks for the link to the digital versions -- now I really don't need the physical ones. It's too bad the pages are just images, with no OCR done to get an embedded text layer.

[zimmertr]

Puzzlr, would you consider exporting that data and sharing it with me? I'd like to take a look through it in Google Earth.

[puzzlr]

Here are the named ones. I have comments for some of the unofficial names saying where I saw them. I'll leave this file here for a while, but it's temporary. I used a custom icon for the placemark that looks like fuzzy blue dot. I'm not sure that will come through. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sK5aHESM80oLoZBFJBVEQ-ilE6rfh6tB/view?usp=sharing