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.

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.

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

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).