The day after the prior hike, amittai and I went out for another hike (So, September 24, 2007). We went from Mowich Lake up to Spray Park in Mount Rainier National Park. This was a 6 mile RT hike, with 1300′ of gain.
peering at shrouded rainier
This was overall a pretty awesome little hike, with a huge return on investment. I had really wanted to get in a quick backpack trip while up in Washington, but it felt like we didn’t have enough time, since Amittai had a morning meeting that ended up with him not getting back to his place until 1 PM or so. As it turns out, the trailhead we left from would have been a great place to camp, since it was a campground, but it was remote enough that we could have felt nice and isolated. Anyway, this is neither here nor there, since we didn’t do that.
Anyway, we left Seattle early afternoon and headed for Mt. Rainier. I picked the hike based off what a ranger had told me a few days prior about good area places to hike. We were headed for the northwest corner of the park (closest to Seattle). There is a road bifurcation there from the main road that leads to Carbon Glacier. Instead, we went on several miles of dirt road, cutting through the surrounding national forest (which has all
these clear cut logged sections – very strange and ugly :/ ). Suddenly, the road enters the park, and the growth is suddenly
lush and amazing, much more diverse than the surrounding forest we had been driving through.
I’m modeling at the falls
Heading out to the end of this road, we reached Mowich Lake, which has a lake, a stand of portapotties, theoretically a ranger station around the lake somewhere, and one of the most remote “car-camping” location feelings I’d seen that near a major city (of course, I’m biased, and the stuff down here is weird, and I guess that trip to Fish Forks passed some remote stuff….). But it would have been a very pleasant place to spend the night; not super crowded or anything.
The trail headed out from a corner of the campground, and we were off. There was nothing particularly unusual about the trail itself as it wound through the forest, but it had a couple of spectacular views. At one point there was a short turnout viewpoint from which there is a fabulous view of Mt. Rainier itself. Shortly after that there was a short spur trail that lead to Spray Falls, which is a fantastic waterfall. It’s the
widest one I’ve ever seen (obviously, it has nothing on like Victoria or Niagara Falls, but I’ve never seen those!). We stared at that for a while, then continued on our way.
entering spray park
It was pretty uphill from there, and just as we were thinking it was getting irritating and it might be time to turn around, we arrived in Spray Park. And it was beautiful. This lovely open meadow clearing, with amazing lights and colors and all. A charming trail meandered through the middle of it, and we stopped and took a break sort of in the middle of the meadow. You couldn’t really see much of anything, since the falls were beneath where we were, and Rainier wasn’t really in view, but it was really awesome nonetheless.
And then we turned around and went home 🙂 Pretty quickly, no real stops. When we got back to the beginning we did stop and look at the lake a little bit, which was incredibly still, allowing us to see the huge expanse of logs that were submerged in the lake. And then we did just basically go home.
