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Winter Scramble - Rainy Lake

Winter Scramble to Rainy Lake

Mark Scheffer Mark Scheffer
January 06, 2025
  • Road suitable for all vehicles

  • Route starts from Middle fork Trailhead.  Discover pass required.  

    take the middle fork trail west (right after crossing the bridge) for approximately .5 miles. once you cross Rainy creek, look for a well defined trail to the left about 100' past the creek crossing.  Follow this  to Rainy lake. 

    The trail is very well defined lower down but becomes sparse and hard to follow once you hit snow. Strongly recommend a GPS with the route downloaded for easier navigation.

It should be noted this was a fairly fast group but all agreed that the stats misled how difficult this route actually was, due to slippery roots, boulder fields, blow downs, and route finding on the upper section.  This is not a winter scramble, as there is no place you would need an ice axe, but would be a significant intermediate snowshoe and  all participants should be in very good shape.  A slow party member would struggle likely doom any trip to turning back  before reaching the lake.  

We started out at 8am anticipating rain but was pleasantly surprised when it stopped shortly after hitting the trail.  The fisherman's trail turn off was very well defined and actually looked better than many "maintained" trails for the first mile or so.  

The trail became very muddy in places and crossed through several boulder fields that were slippery due to  a light cover of wet snow.  later season with more snow  none of this likely would be an issue.

Approximately 2 miles in we were relying solely on GPS for navigation as there very little evidence of a trail as the snow became deeper. We had to switch to snowshoes at around 2800'.  

After 4.5 hours we reached the ridge above the lake and called it good due to turn around time and increased rain making the final 300 yards or so down to the lake unappealing.  

Descent back to the cars took approximately 3 hours and was very slippery due to wet roots on the trail below the snowline and on both boulder fields the trail crossed.  We were back to the cars about 3:45pm.

Total distance 7.8 miles.  Gain was 2800'.