My wife, Danielle, and I recently flew out to Washington state for an epic backpacking trip. We were going to hike the Wonderland Trail, and 93 mile loop hike, encircling the base of Mt Rainier, Washington's highest mountain. We found the trail in a random book we picked up at Borders, entitled 25 best long-distance trails in America. We chose this out of the 25, as we are hoping to climb Rainier someday, possibly next year, and thought this would be a great intro to the mountain and its surrounding area. We flew into Seattle on a sunday, staying at a hotel there that night. Monday morning we went for a long walk around Seattle taking in the city before driving out to Rainier national park. We arrived and checked into the Ranger station in Longmire, the main entrance to the park. Since our backcountry permit didn't start until Tues, we decided to stay at the lovely National Park Inn, right in Longmire. We had lunch, dinner and tues' breakfast there, feasting on excellent homestyle cooked meals, (the best was the massive huckleberry cobbler for dessert Mon nite), knowing that soon we'd be eating nothing but freeze-dried meals and lots of energy bars and trail mix. While eating my massive huckleberry dessert Mon night, we struck up a conversation with a wonderfully talkative couple from Tennessee who we swapped hiking stories with until the restaurant staff dimmed the lights, politely telling us to leave. Tuesday we were out of bed early enjoyed a large filling breakfast and headed out to the trail, hoping to arrive back in Longmire in ten days, still in one piece!
Our first day, we only had 5.8 miles to travel to Devil's Dream campsite, yet it came with a significant climb from Longmire up to Ramparts Ridge. Along the way we came across our first creek crossing where we got our first view of the mountain.
We got into camp by 12 noon, and were able to select the best site out of seven. Because we were into camp so early, we ended up having dinner around five and by 7:30 there was nothing left to do but go to sleep, as we had already gotten deep into our books. The next morning we rose by 5 due to going to bed so early, and this sort of set the tone for the trip. This worked out to our advantage, as all the wildlife sightings we had were first thing in the morning, between six and seven, as we were the first hikers on the trail. Plus we almost always were the first hikers into camp, which enabled us to select the best of the available sites.
On our second day, we had just over ten miles to cover, and a decent amount of elevation change to overcome. The first highlight of the day was climbing from camp to a place called Indian Henry's, a beautiful subalpine meadow filled with wildflowers and dramatic views of Rainie
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Here we found these gorgeous views:
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Here we found these gorgeous views:1st: Mirror Lake, can you guess where it got it's name
2nd: Talk about prime real estate! the ranger cabin at Indian Henry's, sure would tough to have to "work" here.
From here, we continued on to Emerald Ridge, where we enjoyed a "delicious" trail lunch while taking in this view:
In the company of this guy, a marmot that kept popping his head up above the flowers, checking to see if we were dropping any crumbs.
From Emerald Ridge, we descended down to another creek crossing, where we came upon the Devil's Pipe organ, a section of rock that due to the effects of the glaciers looked an extremely twisted pipe organ:
Immediately after the organ, we crossed the South Puyallup river, where I reached out and snapped this great shot of the two of us with the river cutting down the mountainside in the background, on the first try!
That night, we stayed at Klapatche Park, a great site next to small lake in an open meadow.
