Hundreds of Views of Mount Rainier — The Towering Travelers

For Labor Day weekend, we got a campsite near Mount Rainier National Park and had an amazing weekend exploring. It was definitely one of my favorite weekends of 2020.

In our experience, the secret to visiting a national park on a holiday weekend and not going insane is to get up early to see the parts of the park you really want to see, and then spend the afternoon relaxing while everyone is is crowding them. For us, relaxing happened at our large, very forested campsite.

One of my very favorite campsites (photo/Nicole Harrison)

A small lake against the backdrop of shorter mountains in the park (photo/Jason Rafal)

Any trip to Mount Rainier National Park, when it’s clear out at least, involves a lot of staring at the weirdly captivating and gigantic mountain. I was used to 14ers in Colorado, but they fit in there; in an area that’s generally much closer to sea level, a peak over 14,000 feet looks very out of place.

The mountain, with the moon above (photo/Jason Rafal)

More views of Mount Rainier (photo/Jason Rafal)

A watchtower perched high above the clouds (photo/Jason Rafal)

We saw a lot of wildlife at the park, even more than we had expected.

A herd of mountain goats (photo/Jason Rafal)

If you squint, you can see a bear in the field (photo/Jason Rafal)

The next day, we went to another area of the park to see some other angles of the same mountain (you’d think it would get old, but it somehow doesn’t).