The Dang's: Seattle Day 5: Mount Rainier National Park

Sunday morning we got going early, checked out of the hotel, and took the light rail to the airport to pick up our car rental. The car rentals were offsite, so we had to walk from the light rail to the main terminal to get a shuttle over to the rental car center. Other than that it was pretty painless and we were in our car and on the road by 10:30. For our car, we picked out a black Chrysler 200 (I requested a domestic). Naturally, Adam drove and I navigated.

Of course the one day we were heading to the mountains, it was cloudy and overcast. We were getting pretty nervous as you couldn’t see Rainier from a distance, and the fog was just not burning off. Finally, at about 11:30, the sun came out and soon after it was clear and beautiful. We got so lucky!

We decided to enter the park through the northeast entrance, and work our way down throughout the day to our hotel near the southwest entrance. We entered the park at the White River Entrance at noon and bought our park pass for $15. National Parks are such a deal! I love them.

Our first stop was at Sunrise Point on the way up to Sunrise.The road up there freaked me out. It is the highest stretch of road in the park and is usually only open from late June/early July to October due to snow.

From the lookout, it was a short drive up to Sunrise. Sunrise is located at an elevation of 5400 feet.

After parking, we had a quick lunch at the Day Lodge. Adam had a burger and chips while I had clam chowder and jalapeno popcorn. I was coming down with a cold, so the soup felt fantastic on my sore throat. Minus the celery. I picked that nastiness out.

Then we did a hike on the Sourdough Ridge Trail. It was a nice 1.3 mile loop, though half of it was uphill. It offered a great view of Mt. Rainer along with other volcanoes/mountains in the distance.

photo by Adam

Here I enjoyed taking lots of wildflower photos. This is when I took my favorite photo of the trip of Pasqueflower / Western Anemone Seedheads. I'm just amazed at how cool this one turned out -

I love these next two as well -

Adam made a chipmunk friend.

photo by Adam

And we just enjoyed taking lots of photos. Having both cameras with came in handy!

photo by Adam

We took these at the same time. We're cool...

top photo by Adam

We left Sunrise at 2:40 and headed back down the mountain.

Our next stop was at Tipsoo Lake where we did a short .5 mile hike around it. The guidebooks suggested it, but I could have skipped it.

We continued on and made our next stop near the southeast corner of the park at the Grove of the Patriarchs Trail. This was a really cool trail through the woods which ended on an island with 1,000 year old trees. Since they are on an island, they’ve been protected from wild fires. It was an easy 1.5 mile loop trail and definitely worth our time. It was amazing to see trees that large and old.

photo by Adam

These are the roots of a tree that fell over -

There's a boardwalk so you can get close to the trees without damaging their roots -

And we even got to cross a cool footbridge to get there (one person allowed at a time!).

photo on right by Adam

By then we had worked our way over to our hotel, so we checked in at the Paradise Inn at 5:30. It was built in 1916 as one of the “Great Lodges of the West.” It’s only open in the summer since they average 650 inches of snowfall every winter. The record is 1,122 inches set in the winter of 1971-72 (a world record at the time!).

This hotel is run by the National Park Service, so it’s nothing impressive. The common areas have been rehabbed, but the rooms are actually pretty dumpy – what they call “rustic,” I call badly outdated. It was tiny, I bumped my head repeatedly on the hangers that were in the walkway, and there was virtually no soundproofing so we could hear people in the hall as if they were right next to us. However, I knew what to expect going into it and the location is unbeatable. It was a perfect stopping point for the day, and allowed us to get going right away in the morning and do stuff instead of having to reenter the park. And of course there’s no TV, internet, WiFi, phones, etc.

The view from our room was amazing though!


Left: view from our room in the sunny early evening Right: the view disappeared when the fog set in

We had dinner at the Dining Hall which was actually pretty disappointing. The food wasn’t great and neither was the service. The best part was dessert – blackberry pie with huckleberry ice cream.