Mt Rainier National Park! My favorite place to camp in the whole world! Well, maybe its kind of like labor where you think it wasn't so bad once you are a few years removed from it. Every summer as a kid my family would camp at Cougar Rock campground and hike the mountain. We would be on the trails all day without a water bottle or fruit snacks to keep us going. No real destination, just up the mountain! And it didn't matter how young the legs were, we did it without any complaints! At least that's how I remembered it 30 years later :) So that was my plan for our trip this time. We met up with my sister Samantha and her family on Friday afternoon. We set up our tents and got our spaces ready and then we just messed around that afternoon. That evening we were so excited to see the Ranger program at the amphitheater, just like we did when we were kids, but it was awful! This poor ranger was sooo boring, and her subject (stewards of Mt Rainier) was sooo boring that Darcy and Bree fell asleep and it was all Paul and Mason could do to stay awake too. It was the worst one I had seen there and of course it happened to be the one I took my family to after hyping it up to them. The next evening just Samantha and I went and it was great! All about amphibians in the park. The ranger was funny and the tipsy group in the back added to the fun :) Too bad the kids missed that one.
Saturday we hiked the mountain! Or at least, that was the idea. As I said before when we were kids we hiked the mountain for 6 hours without any nourishment no matter how young up hill, both ways! Well, Paul was wondering just what the point of our hike was when we found ourselves trying to cross snow fields with little bodies slipping and sliding all over the mountain. I think it is a late melt this year, there was much more snow than usual.
So we reconnoitered after some "discussion" and decided to go back down the mountain a bit and hit the trail that actually had a waterfall as a destination. It was a good choice. The waterfall was pretty and it was a much easier hike for the little ones. I sure wanted to head up the mountain though. Oh! We finally found a bear! We have been to almost 30 National Parks and never saw a bear till we got to Rainier. It was a big black momma bear and two cubs. You can see her in the picture and her cubs are hiding in the shade of the trees on the right. We were so excited to see bears in the wild!
That afternoon my sister Candace and her family caught up to us, about the time the weather turned and it started to rain. That evening was pretty miserable when all you have is a tent for cover. We were trying to sit under the trees but still within sight distance of the fire. I think everyone went to bed in damp sleeping bags and many woke up in the night soaked. I stayed dry miraculously but I think I might have been the only one. Camping in the rain is no fun. Oh, and this is an old campground without electric or water hook-ups, which is fine, but there were no showers and the nearest water spigot was at the bathrooms which were on a trail through other people's camp sites. At least they had flush toilets! As a kid, all this matters not at all so of course I didn't remember any of it. As an adult in charge of a crew of people it matters quite a bit! We still had a great time but it was definitely throw-back camping. I guess I'll still call it my favorite place to camp due to the MANY memories there, but it wasn't the easiest place to camp. We did have a campfire and roasted marshmallows so what am I complaining about, right?
On Sunday we packed up our wet things and headed to the other side of the park, a place we never visited when I was young, to check out the Grove of the Patriarchs, an old growth forest. Candace's family got totally soaked in their tent and when they got to the visitor's center on the mountain where the trails start the mountain was all clouded over so they couldn't see anything. We were supposed to meet them at the grove but they just headed back home to Dallas instead. I think its safe to say this wasn't their favorite place to camp. We enjoyed the big trees though! There was a cool suspension bridge only one at a time could cross and we all had fun crossing that. The trees were huge! Thousand year old cedars and fir trees. Very beautiful. A bunch of us were able to fit in the roots of a fallen tree. All in all it was a good trip and Bree, who had been looking forward all summer to camping at "Mountain Reindeer" called it a success. Still have to decide if we'll try it again in the near future though.
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