Our Last Day at Mount Rainier

This was our last day to visit the Park before leaving this area.  The only road we hadn’t driven down was the one to White River Campground.  We didn’t want to leave without going up there, so we were up and out early this morning.

This is a hiker’s park, so needless to say, there were several trails to choose from in that  area.  We hadn’t really spent any time on the Wonderland Trail while we’ve been here, so that is the one we selected.

The Wonderland Trail is a long-distance loop around the park and stretches for a distance of about 100 miles.  We did the 2.6 mile section from White River Campground uphill 2000 feet to Sunrise where we got on the Silver Forest Trail for 1.4 miles before stopping for a lunch break.  After lunch, we headed back (downhill, thankfully) to the truck at White River.

View from the trail

This was primarily a woods walk until we got up close to Sunrise which is basically above tree line.  I’m not even going to say the flowers are still gorgeous.  It seems like that’s all I talked about for two weeks.  We would have had some really great views of the mountain, had it not been shrouded in clouds.  Finally, about noon, it peeked it’s head out.

This has been a wonderful place to be for the past couple weeks.  There are so many more trails to hike.  We’ll just have to come back sometime.

Tomorrow, we’ll be preparing to move on Sunday.  Our final destination before turning east and heading for Tennessee is Olympic National Park.