Today I took my wife to see Mount Rainier. We drove down to the east side of the park via the 410. I wanted to take her to one of my favorite easy hikes, the Naches Peak Loop Trail. However, I broke one of the cardinal rules. I didn’t bring a map and I didn’t prepare sufficiently. I thought the trail would be obvious, but the signage was actually confusing. I had planned to hike it clockwise, both for better views and for gentler climbs. It had been maybe ten years since I hiked it last. I had asked several hikers for directions and none of them seemed really confident of their answers. The intersection with the PCT made no mention of the loop trail we were trying to do. We had turned onto that and got a quarter mile downhill towards Dewey Lake when I encountered an elderly woman with a hard hat doing volunteer trail maintenance. She straightened us out. It was only then that I realized that we had gotten onto the wrong trailhead, were going the wrong direction, and in our confusion had diverted to the wrong trail! Having been a scoutmaster, I felt like a real dope. Fortunately we only had to climb a quarter mile back to the right trail. If we hadn’t have talked to that volunteer we would have gotten a couple of miles off track.
Although the trail reports from just a couple of days before talked of beautiful views, smoke had moved in this weekend. Mount Rainier was barely visible through the haze. We encountered a PCT through hiker named Nails, who had walked all the way there from the Mexican border. She was really bummed that The Mountain was so hard to see after all her anticipation. In all my years of hiking, I had never actually encountered a bear in the wild. Today was our day. I wouldn’t have noticed it, but a young couple was standing there staring at it and pointed it out. I would guess it was maybe 100-150 yards downhill from the trail, eating berries or something. I opted to snap a quick photo and be on my way. We also saw chipmunks and a ptarmigan standing there very close to the trail. I surmise it had been fed by humans before and had gotten too tame.
We had finished our hike by 12:30 and had the rest of the day to explore. I had wanted to see the Grove of the Patriarchs out of Ohanapecosh, but I learned that the bridge had washed out three years ago, and won’t be replaced for another three years. So we drove up to Paradise. The views of the mountain were much better there. It wasn’t how I remembered it at all though. The “flying saucer” visitor center has been replaced by one with a more practical one with a sloped roof, named after Henry M. Jackson. There were so many people it felt more like an alpine Disneyland than a national park. I know it was much worse a month ago. All the local trails were so busy that they had been paved in asphalt. It seemed kind of sad. I had planned a nice lunch at the lodge, but the restaurant there had closed just ten minutes before we arrived. We grabbed the last prepared sandwich out of the cafe’s cooler, along with a little soup, and called it lunch.
On our way out we had great views of the Nisqually River, and we stopped by the little Twin Firs loop trail to see an old growth forest. Although our day didn’t go exactly as planned, we still had some spectacular views and fun adventures.
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