Lake Dorothy Packrafting

Paddling on Lake Dorothy

May 29-31, 2026

Eric and Matthew

24 miles hiking, 5 miles packrafting

The Alpine Lakes Wilderness in WA has roughly 300 officially named lakes, but only about half a dozen have islands, and of these it appears only Lake Dorothy has islands that might be big enough to camp on. Our goal for the weekend was to hike to a lake, camp on an island, and make a bathymetric map of the lake using a sonar device. Lake Dorthoty fit the bill. There are two approaches, one from the north and one from the southwest. The north approach from the East Fork Miller River Road is theoretically a 1 mile hike in, but the road washed out years ago, adding an extra 4 miles.

The route

From the southwest, it’s a 12 mile hike to the lake from the Middle Fork Snoqualmie trailhead. That trailhead is much closer to where I live in Issaquah, so we opted for that approach.

Friday evening Matthew flew in from California and we hike a few miles up the trail before camping next to a stream. Saturday we hiked past Snoqualmie Lake, Deer Lake, and Bear Lake, crossing a few short snow patches, to reach Dorothy Lake by late morning.

Paddling to the islands

We inflated the packrafts and put in at the southern end of the lake, the paddled to the biggest island. There we set up our tent at a nice existing campsite. We then set up the sonor device on Matthew’s packraft and paddled up to the northern end of the lake. We did a bunch of lawn mower patterns to try to get good coverage and find the deepest part of the lake. We measured it was 175ft deep near the north end!

In the late afternoon we tried to fish, but didn’t get any bites. I paddled around to tag the highpoints of each of the islands, then we camped out.

Sunday morning there was frost on the boats and it was pretty chilly. We cast a few more times with no luck, then paddled out and hiked out.