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Basic Snowshoe - Kelcema Lake

The Deer Creek road is washed out in several places. May make a nice trail some day.

Brian Carpenter Brian Carpenter
December 30, 2018
  • Road impassable/closed

  • Huge washout at about 2 miles up the Deer Creek road.  This can be traversed on foot if one is careful. There are 2 additional smaller washouts farther up the road.  Also, there are two concrete "dips" where streams cross the road. Depending on time of year and weather these may be running with water. In the last mile before the trailhead there was water running down the road, so we had to hop back and forth from one snow outcrop to another and sometimes just walk in the 1" of water on the road.

    We were able to navigate the washout and obstacles along the road. Trail to the lake is fairly easy to follow.  Trailhead sign is easy to find. There are some pink ribbons marking the route, but stay north of the outlet stream. The trail is in a "gully" created by snow in many places, so look for this.

This trip is best saved for when the snow levels have been low for a while. The high point at the lake is only 3200'. We parked about a mile up Deer Creek road at 2000', where there was no snow on the ground, and started walking. Rain soon turned to snow as we slowly went higher.  At about 2500' and just past one of the washouts we put on snowshoes for the rest of the trip.

Best place to park is about a mile up the road, where an old logging road veers off to the right. Beyond this there is only a slippery, muddy, snowy turnaround just before the big washout. 

The road washouts were fairly easy to navigate through/around. The two concrete stream dips had water running over them, which turned out to be the shallowest place to cross, so there was a bit of amphibious snowshoe action.

Very wet snow and uneven coverage. A few glimpses of blue sky and Devil's peak. Restrooms at Verlot are closed, possibly for the winter.