Snowshoe near Hex Mountain

Headed out north of Roslyn to snowshoe up to Hex Mountain. We missed one of the turns off the forest road on the hike and ended up snowshoeing up and down some of the ridges west of Hex Mountain. Beautiful day to be our snowshoeing. Estimate we went about 8 miles with 2,000+ ft of elevation gain.
The route starts by heading up FS 116, which is open only to logging vehicles in the winter. The road gains elevation from the beginning. We saw deer and a bunch of turkeys.

 There was so much beauty with a variety of trees dusted with snow.

More than a mile up the road, there is a turnoff to an unmaintained logging road that is the way to go to the summer trailhead. On the way out we discovered that very recently a large berm of snow had been plowed in froth of this road hiding the tracks on the other side.

 We ended up hiking over 2 miles up the road when we met some loggers. They let us know we had gone way past the turnoff, but that a short ways back there were tracks going up another ridge, that we could go up and over and eventually reach Hex Mountain. We decided to give it a try. We did not need our snowshoes until heading up the ridge.

 We did get some nice views of Cle Ellum Lake from this extended road walk.

Pano view overlooking Cle Ellum Lake from the first ridge we snowshoed up.

More views from the first ridge.

 Looking over toward the next ridge

 We found some fairly recent tracks that wandered around on old logging roads.

 Lots of pretty trees

 I think these were turkey prints, there were quite large.

Lots of loverly trees.

As this trail continued to climb up the next ridge, we had some great views of Cle Ellum Lake

 This second ridge we were on looked as if it dropped down a little then continued to climb to what I believe is Hex Mountain. We didn't have enough time to continue towards Hex Mountain and get back to the car in the daylight, but decided to follow some old indentations along the old road below to loop back down toward the original road.

 Eventually as we worked our way down we found the summer trailhead to Hex Mountain. Want to come back another day, to go up the correct trail!











Watched the clouds continue to roll in as we hiked out. Great day!
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