On Sunday we decided to go on another hike from the book 100 Hikes in Northwest Oregon & Southwest Washington. We chose, Mirror Lake. The trail head is up near Government Camp, just on the side of the road on Highway 26. The trail itself is gorgeous. It climbs, zig-zagging along the slope, the entire trip up to the lake, which is about a mile and a half. I am very out of shape and don’t do hills very well and i did get out of breath. But I distinctly noticed that I had no problem keeping going. I didn’t really feel the need to stop. I’m not sure why this was. I think it is probably due to the clean air here. It felt so good to be able to actually take deep breaths as I was hiking uphill (Spokane’s air was noticeably bad and even just walking to work could be difficult for me sometimes).

When we got to the top we were greeted with a fork in the path. We decided to go left and we ended up at the lake. It was very pretty but we didn’t have a view of Mt Hood from where we were. He followed the trail around the lake which was a little bit snowy and icy in some places. But the view was worth it, as you can see above. It was absolutely spectacular. Mirror Lake, indeed.

On the view side of the lake are beautiful little campgrounds. In one of them we found this little melting snowman. How cute! Then I realized that they must have gotten lots of snow of there earlier in the week for someone to have made a snowman. It’s weird, because we get nothing but rain down here, but are only 30 miles away (give or take). It’s funny what a difference a few feet in elevation can make on the difference between rain and snow.