Friday we decided on riding a route which includes a one of my favorite trails - 1350 between Manastash Lake and Lost Lake. The overall route we rode included trails and Jeep roads that I've ridden before mixed with other various trails. The fun thing about riding Naches is you can ride the same trails, but mix up the route by picking and choosing various trails to make a different loop because so many of the trails interconnect.
We left camp and headed down Forest Road 19 towards Highway 410, then went left on 410 and headed east for a short distance. We turned left up Milk Lake Road and followed it to the beginning of the Milk Creek Trail #965.
Milk Creek Trail follows a huge mudslide that came crashing down from a small mountain Lake up near Manastash Ridge, but it wasn't from Milk Lake. The trail crosses Milk Creek a few times. Most of the trail goes through the middle of the mudslide at lower elevations.
At the end of the trail, we connect to the 686 Jeep Road and follow it to the top of Manastash Ridge. We turned left on the ridge and follow the Jeep road through Tripod Flats and then turn onto a different Jeep road that leads us towards the back side of Lost Lake. Once the Jeep road reaches the lake, it turns into a single track trail and the fun begins! We end up at the trail 1350 intersection at the other end of Lost Lake - a left turn would take us towards the Taneum trail system, right turn leads towards Manastash Lake. We head towards Manastash Lake and stop at the lake for the usual round of photos and decide this will also be our lunch stop.
After a break we continue up 1350 to Manastash Ridge. The trail is full of switchbacks and is a steep but easy climb out of the basin where the lake is. Once we arrived up on the ridge, we played around on Funny Rocks for a short time, then watched the Jeep crowd do the same.
Our next stop was Moon Rocks, a place I had never been to before. Someone in the Jeep group gave us directions to get there. It was only about a half mile off our normally traveled path so we went to check it out. There was probably somewhere around 25 4x4s of various types playing on the rocks or being spectators. We saw one Jeep that had managed to get his rig wedged in to a very tight spot. After watching the action and taking a number of pictures we continued on our way to the main Jeep road that runs across the top of the ridge. We followed it back to 686 and went down the way we had came up. At the end of 686 we continued down Milk Lake Road back to Highway 410 and went back to camp.
A few miles before we arrived back at camp, along FR19, my bike hit 16,000 miles and Jeff's hit 8000 miles - they did this at the exact same moment so we stopped to photograph the event.
This was another awesome day of riding with perfect riding temperatures and no casualties (broken bike parts).