Mount Rainier National Park, a 369-sq.-mile Washington state reserve southeast of Seattle, surrounds glacier-capped, 14,410-ft. Mount Rainier. Atop 6,400-ft.-high Sunrise, the highest point in the park reachable by car, visitors can admire Rainier and other nearby volcanoes, including Mount Adams. The park’s 5,400-ft.-high Paradise overlook offers mountain views, summertime wildflower meadows and hiking trailheads. (Source: NPS Website)
Established: March 2, 1899
Size: 236,381 acres
Rank: 30
#Visitors in 2018: 1,518,491
(Visited August 2018)- We made plans in advance to visit Mount Rainier after our visit to Glacier Bay National Park. As we try to do with all the national parks we visit, we did our research and made the appropriate reservations for the entire visit. We booked 4 nights at Paradise Inn several months before. We were driving from the Seattle area and decided to enter from the north. We wanted to arrive early enough to enjoy a full day at the Sunrise end of the park before driving the 2 hours or so to Paradise. We didn’t plan to come all the way back up to Sunrise again during this visit, so we wanted to make this visit count. We entered the park and drove to the Sunrise Visitor Center to get our park passport stamped and to talk to the rangers about hiking in the area. Our first views of Mount Rainier from an overlook pull out were spectacular. We then chose to hike the Frozen Lake Trail and once there, we decided to go further- to Second Burroughs. We hiked back to Sunrise Visitor Center via the Emmons Vista Trail. We realized how bad the smoke haze was during our hike. There were several forest fires all throughout the west coast and it definitely impacted the views. We were lucky in one respect, however… Mount Rainier was out in full splendor for the entire 4 day visit!!
Our first full day at Mount Rainier National Park was spent hiking the Skyline Trail via Golden Gate Trail up to Panorama Point and down the rest of Skyline Trail via Deadhorse Creek Trail. While it was only a 5 mile round trip hike, we took most of the day doing it because we stop often to take photographs….photo-hiking we like to call it. I took no photographs at Panorama Point due to the extremely hazy conditions. The first part of Skyline Trail is paved with gorgeous meadow views of Mount Rainier and easy access to Myrtle Falls. Marmots scampered around everywhere. The first time we saw one, we snapped away, only to find them everywhere. The challenge then became getting good photos! We saw a lot of snowfields on this trail with several small groups of hikers doing practice hikes, presumably preparing for a full mountain ascent. We learned that only 50% of the people who attempt to summit actually make it. No matter the haze, the views were gorgeous!!
One of the iconic photos I wanted to capture at Mount Rainier was a reflection of the mountain in Reflection Lakes. The hazy conditions made this goal difficult. We went to Reflection Lakes three different times during the visit and finally on the last day, I got the best I was going to get on this trip. I’m never completely satisfied, however, so I will have to come back:).
In the quest to find more areas of the park where we could capture reflections of Mount Rainier, I learned of Bench Lake from a professional photographer I follow. Bench and Snow Lakes Trail is a 2.5 mile round trip trail where you have to scramble a bit off trail to find Bench Lake where we found nice reflections, despite the haze. It was a different perspective than Reflections Lake and a lot less popular of a location so we had it to ourselves. There were also some beautiful forest and mountain views along the trail.
We then drove to the Stevens Canyon area in the SE corner of the park to explore a very different eco-system from what we had experienced so far. We hiked the Grove of the Patriarchs Trail with its massive Douglas-firs, hemlocks and cedars, some nearly 40 feet in diameter and more than 300 feet tall. The largest of the trees could be seen from a boardwalk loop. There were tons of nursery logs- fallen logs that now support a variety of plant and tree life. Another interesting feature of this hike was the hanging bridge over the Ohanapecosh River. The water was so crystal clear!
The next hike we took was to Silver Falls. I love to photograph waterfalls, so this was our primary goal for this hike. We chose an intermediate length hike and hiked about 2 miles roundtrip from the Grove of the Patriarchs Trailhead to Silver Falls and back. We did not time it right for the optimal light, but it wasn’t too bad. It was fairly crowded, but again, we’ve experienced much worse.
The next area of the park we chose to explore was west of Paradise; specifically Comet Falls Trail and Van Trump Park. Again, photographing Comet Falls was our primary goal. We hiked a total of 6 miles with a 2200 ft. elevation change. The trail was beautiful with lots of changing landscapes- forest, rock slides, wildflowers, waterfalls, mountain views, and meadows. It was a fairly challenging hike, but since we planned a full day for it, it wasn’t too bad. Comet Falls was a beautiful waterfall that offered so many different viewing opportunities all along the winding trail.
We pushed on to Van Trump Park and were so glad we did! We were rewarded with a very different view of Mount Rainier with a beautiful, high elevation meadow that was so much more remote and wild than the meadow near the Paradise Visitor Center. The cloud cover created a soft, diffuse light that showed a very different palette and mood from the other photographs we had captured up to that point.
We definitely made the most of our trip to Mount Rainier National Park. Spending 4 full days there was a nice amount of time, although we could have stayed longer. While the smoke haze was disappointing, we still saw a beautiful and majestic Mount Rainier and her surrounding forests, meadows, and waterfalls. In the last entry in this blog, I leave you with a variety of wildflowers and plants that we saw all over the park. We were not there during the peak wildflower season, we still saw a lot. Enjoy God’s creations!
