My 8 year old son and I set out early Saturday morning (I little later than we had hoped given that we had heard that the car park has limited spaces) and arrived to a full car park at 9:30am with several cars waiting for spots to open up. We made a decision to go down to one of the lower car parks and we snagged one final spot which added 1.6 miles each way to the hike (I don't recommend doing this as we had to hike up on the side of the road and the shoulder was tight in some spots). It took us about 40 minutes to get up to the trail head but we were both in good spirits and ready to hike. The trail is in beautiful condition and the weather was sunny about 60 degrees and no wind. We couldn't have asked for better weather. We really enjoyed the hike up, it was clearly marked, had several beautiful bridges and some scenic vista points. The landscape was beautiful and you can't miss the beautiful Manzanita trees (with their beautiful reddish branches), be sure to touch the trees as their trunks are unusually cool. There was also a lot of snow/frost on the ground from earlier in the week. It was a welcome surprise and was enough to have a little snowball fight. The hike was fantastic and seeing the concrete building at the summit as our north star always getting closer. We made it to the summit around lunch (we took the little trail with the stairs at the summit). There was hardly anyone there and we looked around and took plenty of photos. We made it to the summit in about 2 hours and a little under 1.5 hours on the way down. This was one of my favorite hikes on the list this year and I look forward to the opportunity to hike it again. With the addition of the distance from the lower car park was a little over 11.4 miles.