To view photos I took on Memorial Day, 2004, along the Number 22 Lake trail, click here.
You’ll find the trailhead along the Mountain Loop. The lake itself is the obvious star of this trail. It’s a glacier-carved lake about 50 feet deep and surrounded on three sides by steep cliffs. In spring, these cliffs are dotted with small waterfalls of snowmelt which feed the lake and in turn the creek. Apparently, this area of land was set aside during the 1920’s for research. Back then a large amount of logging was taking place in this area of the Cascades, and it seems that people were beginning to worry about its effects on wildlife and water sources. So the imaginatively-named Number 22 Lake was reserved for study, along with a swath of land below the lake containing old-growth forest, the Number 22 Creek, and a large talus. (Sidebar: a talus is an area of a mountainside that has been covered with a layer of rock debris. Now we both know.) These days it is quite heavily traveled but still offers amazing scenery.
Length: 2.7 miles each way
Difficulty: moderate
Elevation gain: 1500 feet
Ending elevation: 2500 feet
Journey time: about 3 hours