Mt. Rainier National Park: Wilderness Behind the Urban Monster
Why? It seems to be the number one question recently when we set off on a trip by car. This time even more so, since crossing the border to the US, especially on a long weekend is brutal. Naively we thought that if we’d cross on Sunday, meaning the middle of the long weekend, the wait wouldn’t be long. We ended up waiting for an hour and a half… The only silver lining in the situation was that the kids miraculously slept through most of the wait. If they would have been awake I’m pretty sure we would have turned around. That would have been unfortunate since that first day aside, this entire trip to Mt. Rainier National Park was wonderful, and it’s one of the most scenic destinations we’ve been to.
Our troubles did not however end with crossing the border… Five minutes into our drive in the US, while both kids were already awake and tired of sitting in the car for so long, we were pulled over by the police. Welcome to the US! It turned out that Gili did not move over when passing a police car on the shoulder with flashing lights. They had another police car waiting just to catch those (mostly Canadians I assume) who broke this unknown rule. Luckily the police officer was nice enough and did not end up giving us a ticket.
The only bright part of this day was the yummy Mexican food at La Gloria Taqueria by Bellingham. Then we carried on to the very crowded metropolitan area of Seattle. Despite it being the weekend there was still heavy traffic and our progress was slow. We started realizing that perhaps we wouldn’t be able to drive as far as we hoped on that day, but where would we stop? There were no campgrounds anywhere in sight. We did pull over to a horrific RV park in Everett but decided to carry on. Everything surrounding us was big and unattractive – big highways, tall buildings, huge outlets malls. Again I asked myself “why?”. Why did we come all the way here, was there really nature anywhere close by? Was there really wilderness behind this massive urban monster? But then Mt. Rainier peeked out from somewhere. It was still far away but it gave me hope. We were heading in the right direction at least.
Eventually we managed to get close to Mt. Rainier National Park and found a nice campground called The Dalles Campground and pulled into a site at 8:40pm. We had a quick dinner, pitched the tent and went to sleep. Everyone was exhausted after the most tiring day of this trip – The Drive.
In the morning we had a yummy pancake breakfast at camp made by chef Gili and drove off to Paradise Visitor Centre. The kids fell asleep and continued sleeping in the parking lot for over three hours. In the meantime Gili went to the ranger’s station and arranged a multi day hike for us starting the next day. Then after everyone was up and about we did a short but steep hike to Alta Vista. The views were incredible but there were also so many people. I was a bit worried, would we really be able to get away from the crowds on our multi-day hike?
The next day we set off with our heavy backpacks towards Upper Palisades Lake. We had lunch and a quick swim for Gili at Clover Lake and after that to my relief we started to lose the crowds. In fact we saw very few people over the next three days. The campground where we stayed had only two sites. On the first night there was a lone guy in one of them, but he left the next morning and on the second night it was just us.
The hike included passing by a few small lakes and fields of purple lupines, a few creeks and nice views of the Palisades. It was pretty hot and I was regretting a bit that I didn’t swim during lunch so I jumped into the lake as soon as we arrived in the evening. It was a bit chilly but refreshing nonetheless.
We spent the next day exploring Brown Peak just behind the campground. Neil insisted on bringing his backpack along, even though we told him he could take it easy on that day, he still wanted to be just like Abba. Neil climbed easily and from the top we saw incredible views of Mt. Rainier. This little hike is definitely worth it since we wouldn’t have gotten a view of Rainier from the hike otherwise.
After hiking back down we spent the rest of the day lazing by the lake. Gili, Kai and I went in for a swim while Neil claimed it was too cold. Kai was very happy in the water though, this baby is just a natural water baby. Another highlight at the campground was “the outhouse with no outhouse”. The toilet was just outside in the open which Neil thought was very funny.
During our hike out we did see quite a few people heading in. All of them were day hikers including a group of elderly women from the Seattle area who told us it’s their weekly Thursday hiking club. We got comments from most people on how brave we were getting kids into the backcountry. The hike didn’t feel like such a huge effort though – with the trail in such a good condition, a nice camp site, lake swimming and the lack of bugs (mostly). After our experience earlier in the season in Wells Gray we were a bit worried about the bugs, but were pleasantly surprised. The biggest effort for me was carrying the heavy backpack. Neil did get tired towards the end though, especially since there were a few steep sections on the trail. A few boosters later and he made it out like a trooper and was very satisfied with his achievement.
After setting camp at White River Campground we decided to head to the nearest town that was only about 20 miles away. We were running low on gas so we decided to make an outing out of it and had dinner at the one and only restaurant in town. We were all super hungry and waited for the slow food to arrive impatiently. My burger came with a little American flag on top, I guess it was a very patriotic burger. Neil had coconut shrimps that may or may not have caused him a week of some sort of a horrible stomach bug…
It turned out that our campground was the very same one where Gili started his climb up Mt. Rainier six year ago. When we just got to Rainier he couldn’t remember any details about that climb, but progressively he started remembering more and more. I guess a lot of things happened in between, as that trip was prior to having children (BC as we call it).
With a few hours to spare before starting to drive back we did a nice hike to Frozen Lake by Sunrise Visitor Centre. Unfortunately we didn’t get to see the bear and cubs who were apparently living by Shadow Lake. We timed everything just perfectly so that by the time we started driving north both kids fell asleep easily and woke up just as we were pulling up to our friends place in North Bend 2.5 hours later.
Recently Gili connected with a buddy from their climbing days back in Israel and it turned out that his friend Zack and his wife Tova now live in North Bend, which was conveniently located on our way back from Rainier. It was really fun to hang out with them, see a bit of their town (a playground with a zip line was a highlight for Neil), eat at a yummy Mexican restaurant in a town nearby and to sleep in their very comfy guest room. It also made the drive back a lot more manageable and a lot less painful.
It also rained during the night so the roof on top of our heads was even more appreciated, and we had a cozy morning before setting off. Just as we were leaving Neil threw up into a puddle by their place but luckily he didn’t throw up in the car and was fine all the way till we got back home. Kai’s nap lasted even after we stopped at our traditional stopover, Trader Joe’s in Bellingham.
The border alerts on the highway claimed that the wait for the way back to Canada was over an hour which wasn’t good news on our part. We decided we’d spend more time in Bellingham which included of course Mexican food (at Ah Chihuahua), ice cream (at Mallard Ice Cream) and a playground in a newly developed waterfront area. We checked the border times closely but things didn’t seem to be improving much so in the end we decided we’d just have to get it over with. We ended up waiting only an hour but once again somehow we lucked out and both kids slept through it, and all the way home, and only woke up as we pulled into our parking garage back home. Mission accomplished!
