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We went up the Fire Trail to Mills Junction without encountering any snow, the trail was mostly dry except the usual wet spots.
We then headed for the bridge to cross Andrews Creek not knowing what to expect with the reports of the bridge being out. There had been one trip report recently though (I believe it was Alice's post) that had a picture of small logs placed at the crossing. It was reassuring but ya never know with the way the water is running.
Upon reaching the crossing, we found that the handrail was the only thing left of the original bridge and indeed there were small logs placed over the creek. The logs looked a bit on the shaky side but walking on them gave a secure enough feeling for all but ones like Snady.
Right after the crossing, the creek is flowing reasonably strong over the trail and some fancy footwork was needed to keep out feet dry. We had to step into a few inches of water a couple times. However, I noticed there had been some traffic going between the two trees on the Mills Lake side of the creek that were grown right on the creek bank. I went through these two trees on the way out and it was a breeze.
When we reached the second bridge that crosses Glacier Creek we found that the logs were broken from the snowload of winter but the logs were still strong enough to support us.
The trail had been mostly snow free so far and we headed up the trail after the bridge to find snow after the steps and in a few low spots before reaching Mills Lake. The snow was hard and we made good time to Mills.
The trail along side Mills had very little snow and we didn't really run into snow until after we passed the Glacier Basin Camp Ground turn off. The bridge crossing the creek to the campground was also broken but we watched a couple campers crossing it and they did fine.
We crossed several snowfields and numerous small drifts by the time we reached the turn off to Shelf Lake but it was after that when the drifts started getting pretty big. One drift had some very good steps in the snow but it was tall and steep enough that a slip out of the snow steps wouldn't have been good.
When we got to the point where the trail is flat over to the bottom of Ribbon Falls we saw that everything was snow covered and it looked quite steep and exposed heading up anywhere near the falls. We instead headed up at the beginning of the flat area traversing above trees to give us something to stop on should we slip. It was rather steep but the snow was solid and we soon arrived at Black Lake.
The gully heading east from Black Lake was completely filled with snow with the exception of one small area where the stream had melted through. We marched right up that snow with it being hard also, just like the rest we'd been on so far.
We first went to Frozen Lake with plans to later traverse just below the base of Spearhead over to Green Lake. We climbed up close to the west corner of Spearhead and then headed west to Frozen Lake.
From Spearhead's corner, we looked over the snowfield we planned to traverse below the face of Spearhead and it looked much less steep than it did from down below.
We had snacks at Frozen and then headed towards Green Lake via the snowfield below Spearhead. The going was easy until we began the climb up the other side of the snowfield to gain the ridge extending off the east edge of Spearhead's base. We gained more than we needed to but going the lower route around the corner would have put us below Green with a climb after that. I think it was more enjoyable to go the higher route at least.
Beings we had gained more than needed we decided to head to Little Italy Lake first and came across this small pond that lies just west of Little Italy:
I took these pictures from the top of a small rock moraine that lies between Little Italy and the small unnamed pond and here is Jinks Jr. coming up the ridge with Jinks down in the low spot where the small pond is:
From the top of the moraine, Little Italy was hidden but The Keyboard Of The Winds stood out prominently:
Little Italy still had all it's ice but a nice pool of water had collected on top the sunken ice:
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We had decided to travel along the eastern edge of the flats below us on the way down because it was all snow and we soon got to Green Lake:
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