I'll see if I can keep this short enough to avoid the primary filegroup demons.. Lost Lake is open. The road is plowed. The cabins are open. Boats are for rent. Just the campgrounds are still closed. The sun was bright. The sky was blue. The clouds were puffy white and rotating around the sky. It looked like this..

Which would I suppose make these Hood strawberries...

A boat on the blue water and a jet in the blue sky... 

The sky kept changing as the day lazily passed..

With this mid-afternoon halo around the sun...

More at http://picasaweb.google.com/pdxgene/LostLake7

 

Holy smokes! I went there last year in June and it looked like this:

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Photos: http://mattisnotfrench.smugmug.com/
Facebook: add me! (Matt Reeder, Portland State University)

Thanks for the report! I've been wanting to go canoeing up there ever since someone told me about it a couple summers ago. It'd be fun to boat and then enjoy a short hike in the snow. What's the elevation up there? Is it getting any of the snow they're experiencing? I wonder just how long I have before the snow's all gone.. though that's not a big concern. Mainly wanting for some calm water to paddle around in :)

Right about 3,100'. If they got any snow today it was probably only a brief flurry or three. The shady end of the trail around the lake could take a bit longer to melt out. And it seems like every forest trail is going to have a lot of trees / branches / debris down from the weight of the snow. From where I was sitting it didn't look like there was any snow going up to Lost Lake Butte but I think it's more that the tree cover is thick. I'm sure it's lurking under there. You get a great view of Mt Hood from up there but unless the storm knocked down a couple carefully selected trees you can't really see the lake anymore (of course it's been a couple years since I hiked up there). If you can go on a weekday you'll pretty much have the place to yourself.

Thank you Gene, for another useful - and artistic - snow level report.
:-)
Cheers, Peter

What a difference a week can make. I went to lost lake on Thursday and the snow has melted a lot since your first posts Gene. But it is going to be a very long time before the campground is going to be ready.

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“We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.”
~John Hope Franklin

Nice and concise reporting pdxgene!  Was the halo that distinct in the sky? Wow!

Yummm, strawberries sound really good right now.

fettster:

Was the halo that distinct in the sky? 

It was one of the best of those that I remember seeing, the colors were sharper than the picture shows. Especially since the sky away from it was such a deep blue and the clouds were just around the halo.. I've tried taking these a bunch of times and this was about the best yet. It's murder for the camera looking straight up into the sun like that, even when you can shield most of it behind a tree. You try and fake it out by focusing somewhere else and then moving it but that doesn't always work.