Mount Rainier

Our Washington Vacation continued....

My favorite day of our vacation was at Mt. Rainier. Any of you who know me very well will understand why - I love mountains! I love to hike and see beautiful scenery, waterfalls, lakes, rivers, and wildflowers. I love the cool fresh air at high altitude.

As we drove up the mountain, it was really lush. Mt. Rainier get almost daily rain and was really beautiful and green. The trees met overhead and made a tree tunnel!

We stopped several times to take pictures of waterfalls. Here we are are sitting on a bridge over the middle of a waterfall. The next picture shows the waterfall under the bridge.















We got up to the top of the road and hiked a loop trail. It was so beautiful!!!






It was raining just a light misty, intermittent rain that cooled the air. We were glad for the cloud cover because most of the trail was in the open and would have been sunny and hot without the clouds and misty rain.

A lot of the mountain is covered with glaciers, and we hiked on glaciers a lot of the time. In fact, we had intended to take a longer trail, but decided on the lower one because the upper trail was so snow covered and wet and slippery from the rain - I didn't want to fall.














Every view was so gorgeous.

There were wildflowers of every color covering the ground. One time we turned a corner, and Greg just handed me the camera because he knew I would want a picture of all the flowers!

The bright pink flowers are Kings Crown. We also saw Queen's Crown. They are both a variety of paintbrush flower.




































We saw a marmot who kindly posed for our camera.

We had a wonderful day!