Mt. Rainier NP

It was a beautiful, clear day as we drove from Seattle to Mt. Rainier NP, about 90 miles south east of the city.  We could see the snow-covered (actually, glacier-covered) peak while we were still in the traffic of the city.  We had not seen it on our earlier days in Seattle.

Mt. Rainier is the largest peak in the Cascade mountains and it dominates the skyline.  There are other mountains around it, but they are much lower and so you kind of forget that this is a whole range of mountains rather than a single one.  They have had a long spring and snow fairly recently so it wasn't long after we entered the park that we came upon six feet of snow!

We did a lot of the same activities that we've done in other parks - hiking, driving, oohing and ahing as we drove around on narrow roads.  The whole area is very beautiful.  We hiked in one area called "Grove of the Patriarchs."  Some of the trees were 1,000 years old.  There was one display of a tree dating from 1300!

That last picture shows the handiwork of some beavers. The tree was probably two feet in diameters, so I'm not sure how they will move it around once they complete the job of getting it down.

Our hotel was the Paradise Inn, which is inside the park and about half way up Mt. Rainier.  This was built in 1919 and has been renovated some, but the rooms are rather cramped.  I saw a sign saying rooms without a bath were $3, but that was in 1949.  We didn't get that rate!

The lodge had the same kind of "western" architectural style, with exposed logs in the lobby.  We went to a Ranger talk in the evening and the lobby was a center of activity for guests and visitors.  We noticed lots of people with hiking gear but it was ice-hiking gear, not the type of waling through the woods that we were doing.  The park lets people hike on the 25 or so glaciers around the mountain, even going to the very summit, where some  active steam vents carve out large tunnels that hikers are able to explore.

Matthew got another Junior Ranger badge. This was his seventh and he really enjoys the challenge.

As we left the park we tried to see as many flowers as possible.  Beth had read about huge meadows full of sub-alpine flowers as she prepared for the trip, but the snow was covering them!

We left Mt Rainier after one night, headed toward Olympic NP, on the peninsula between Seattle and the Pacific Ocean,.  We stayed in Olympic, which gave us a chance to see another state capital building!  And we're happy to share that here.