Mount Rainier...Finally

If there were a perfect day to visit Mount Rainier, it would be today. We have absolutely no regrets about waiting until our final day to drive down there. It was a great way to end the vacation, not to mention relaxing. We're in the airport now and our plane is getting ready to board in about ten minutes, so I'm going to have to make this quick.

We were checked out of the Ace Hotel by 9:30 or so, and got started on our drive down to Rainier pretty much right away. It's about a 2 and a half hour drive, so we stopped for a quick breakfast off the interstate, then made our way along another 60 miles of state road to arrive at the park entrance.

It's a pretty amazing park, sectioned off into different elevations. We started in something close to a national old-growth forest, then made our way up to the tree line, stopping by plenty of overlooks and vistas of the mountain along the way. We were worried during the morning because of all the low-hanging clouds around the area, but those all pretty much burnt off by noon and by the time we made it to the top of the tree line, we had a magnificent view.

We stayed up there for awhile and hung around the old visitor center, then meandered through a few paths that were completely covered in over 20 feet of snow. On our way back to the car we ran into a red cascades fox running through the parking lot. There was a ranger there making sure that he didn't get hit, because as we learned from her, the fox (actually a subspecies of the red fox) is an endangered species, only local to the Cascade Mountains. We watched him make his way over the snow bank, then headed back towards our car and drove all the way back down the mountain to the lodge for some lunch.



By the time we finished up, we only had an hour or two for some hiking, so we checked out a few of the trails around the bottom of the ridge, but even those were completely covered in literally feet of snow. We toughed it out for a while, got some amazing views, then after one last glance up at the mountain, hiked back to our car and started the long drive back towards Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Not only was it a relaxing and peaceful day, but the weather was absolutely beautiful and like I said before, it was the perfect ending for our trip. We couldn't have asked for anything more.