Trip Report
Day Hike - Ashland Lakes
An easy to moderate hike to Ashland and Beaver Plant Lakes off the mountain loop highway.
Mark Scheffer
- Sun, Jul 15, 2018
- Day Hike - Ashland Lakes
- Ashland Lakes
- Day Hiking
- Successful
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- Road recommended for high clearance only
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The FS road is very rough to the trailhead. In my high clearance Tacoma 4x4 I still managed to bottom out several times on the drive to the trailhead. While we DID see a Rav4 at the trailhead, I would NOT take anything without considerably more clearance than that. The ruts and very deep pot holes required considerable effort to find a way though at times even with high clearance.
Once we got to the trailhead (note it requires a discover pass, not a forest service pass) the trail was clearly marked and easy to follow. At times the trail was pretty rough and more of a scramble than a hike (but very easy and very short distance only).
Due to our no show the trip was officially canceled as there was just two members on the trip at that point. however, we elected to do the hike anyway since we were there and at considerable effort to get up the road (well I elected to continue on. My 13 year old son was strongly opposed but his vote was over ruled. ;-). Due to the heat and muggy conditions we made Beaver Plant Lake our turnaround. very scenic lake with a nice board walk to get to the lake shore, which is boggy even with the dry weather. bugs were a problem in the forest but oddly not at the lake. This could be because of the dozens of small frogs that were everywhere around the lake.
Overall, this was a nice hike and destination but probably not worth the effort going up that road. Note I did a scramble of Bald Mt two years ago that also used this road and it was in considerably better shape back then compared to this trip. Hopefully they will do some road repair/rut and pothole patching soon as this road is just a bad winter storm season away from probably becoming impassable.