Mountains!!!!

I played on one!! A couple days after Doug got here we drove up to Mount Rainier and hiked like 8ish miles.  Here’s some photooooos!

 

After a little over 4 hours of driving… seeing the 18 mile mark was squee inducing!

Amg we made it!

Then we got to drive over this awesome bridge! It was a single lane so thankfully there was nobody else out there that day to play chicken with.

If you look at the top of the mountain you can see the snow line.  Pretty awesome imo.

We finally made it around 1-2ish in the afternoon.  We parked and Doug went to talk to the ranger and pay him, and I made us sammiches for the picnic.  Most of the trail that we wanted to drive up had been washed out, so the original spot we wanted to go to was going to take like 9 hours to hike.  We decided instead to just go to the green lake trailhead and hike up to the waterfalls.

 

^ closed due to washout =\

This is how the trail started out, and after about 2 miles…

..it turned into this!  It was awesome! And all day it was raining (well NW version of rain) off an on and it was a chilly 45-50 deg.  I think it was perfect for hiking, just cool enough to keep from overheating. 

 

We saw looooots of uprooted trees. Most of them were huge, so for a better idea of how big they were, this is Doug standing by one of the trees.  What's really neat is that you can see all of the rocks imbedded in the roots.

 

And since I like to wander into places I shouldn't be… we saw a little offshoot road, and of course, I wanted to go down it.

After walking down the road a bit we found this sign, prolly not a good one.  And further up was this..

Odd.. but interesting!

 

So we eventually made it to the green lake trail and hiked (actually hiked instead of walking down a washed out road) about 2 miles until we got to the waterfalls.  It was awesome to hear it get louder and louder as we got closer.  We found a mostly flat spot on the side of a cliff to have our sammiches and pirate booty! We sat there for awhile and I got some neat shots.

 

Then we decided it was getting a lil dark and chilly, so we headed back to the car.  The hike back didn't take nearly as long as going up.  Prolly because I didn't find every little thing to take photos of or more little trails to go adventure on.

 

Right when we got to the car it got dark. I don't think we could have timed any of it more perfectly.  It was an awesome day I must admit.

 

Thank you again Doug!

 

<3<3