Steve climbing up to the ice smear
Elain and I drove up to the Narada Falls trailhead on Sunday, hoping to find some ice somewhere. The WI2 flow opposite Narada Falls was not really "in" (ice coverage was too sparse for my taste), although I'm sure it is climbable. The other flows in that same gully did not appear to be "in", either. So we put on our snowshoes and walked over to Lane Peak, to look for ice on Lane Peak's NE buttress. It is about an hour walk to the Tatoosh Creek, and another 30 minutes to reach the buttress from there. We did not find any significant ice there, just a few icicles starting to form. Some of the steep gullies are filling with snow, which is a good start, I guess.
There is a hill east of Lane Peak's NE buttress, whose north face had some interesting ice smears forming. We hiked up to it but found the ice was way too thin. A word of caution: the 30-degree slope leading up to it had 8-12" of unconsolidated snow on top of a smooth layer of ice.
Given what we found at Narada and Lane Peak, we decided not to bother hiking up the Nisqually drainage to check on "Mikey's Gully". But from the road it looked as though two steep pillars are starting to form, on the cliffs above the Nisqually. I have no idea if those pillars are named, accessible routes or whatever.
I imagine that the many people going up there for skiing had a much more productive day than we did. But it was a good snowshoe outing.
Steve climbing up to the ice smear
Steve below a small ice smear