Mt Rainier — Blog — The Towering Travelers

Between Christmas and New Year’s, we spent a couple of days in a cabin near Mount Rainier. We got incredibly lucky with weather, as we were there between snow storms, and we were able to do a lot of beautiful hiking and snowshoeing.

Some mushrooms that look like potato chips (photo/Jason Rafal)

The lower elevations in the park were incredibly green (photo/Jason Rafal)

A log providing a home for other plants (photo/Jason Rafal)

A somewhat rare photo of both of us (photo/Jason Rafal)

We got lucky with weather for the entire trip, but the day we went snowshoeing was amazing - we had a completely clear, bright blue sky above the snow-covered mountain. It was visually overwhelming, but very beautiful.

Jason is enjoying sunstars on his new camera (photo/Jason Rafal)

Following tracks down the slope (photo/Jason Rafal)

Windswept snow against a saturated sky (photo/Jason Rafal)

I insisted on sitting in the snow, but I almost took us both down trying to get back up (photo/Jason Rafal)

A classic winter scene (photo/Jason Rafal)

After a day of snowshoeing, we went to Alder Lake, down the valley from Rainier, and spent some time exploring the otherworldly land of mud and stumps.

A wholly different planet than earlier in the day (photo/Jason Rafal)

In addition to sunstars, he’s also leaning into black and white (photo/Jason Rafal)

On our way home, we decided to hike to a set of waterfalls. The hike was a bit harder than anticipated on tired legs, but the waterfalls were all wonderful.

It had a very Jurassic Park feel (photo/Jason Rafal)

Slightly frozen mud everywhere (photo/Jason Rafal)

A tiny, very bright fungus (photo/Jason Rafal)

It was a very fun trip to finish off an exceptionally rough year, and I find myself very grateful to be in Washington right now.

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).

Mount Rainier, This Time in Winter

Hundreds of Views of Mount Rainier