I’ve heard many times that an upward trend in GPA looks good on an application.
FWIW, I’ve also heard these schools do not consider high school freshman grades when judging GPA:
Princeton
Stanford
UCs
CMU
JHU
Cal Poly
My son had so-so freshman GPA (3.4 ish), better Soph year (3.7 ish), 4.0 junior and 4.0 first semester senior year. Although rejected at JHU and Cal Poly, he was accepted and attends CMU. YMMV of course.