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“Enjoy this Day!” were among the first words Kim said to me yesterday and since I thought I had been doing a bang up job doing just that this entire trip, I looked at her a bit perplexed. She then proceeded to explain to me that there was nothing but rain in the forecast for days to come and this was going to be our only day of sunshine for sometime.
Kim seemed to have miraculously recovered from her cold (I knew the sulphur springs would help, just sayin) and with a weather outlook of sunshine and 50 degrees, we decided to hike Skyline Trail up to Panoramic Point in the Paradise section of the park.
We awoke at Campsite #7 in Mounthaven to sunshine:

Our campground was quirky cute:

Let me digress a bit. The day before we had taken a short trip into the park to visit the Longmire Museum which sadly was closed for the season. We did get to see a cross section of a huge tree with date markers on it which we both thought was beyond cool.

The middle tag showed the date the tree began:

The last tag shows the date it was cut down:

Hundreds of Years Old!!!

OK, back to the hike! We were past excited as we hadn’t hiked in a bit and were really anxious to get back to it. We drove through the Nisqually entrance to the park:

and drove the 18 miles to the Paradise Visitor’s Center. We drove past glacier rivers running through miles and miles of glacier rock.
At 9 miles or so, we stopped to get some pictures of Christine Falls:

Then we drove over the bridge over the Nisqually River which is fed by the Nisqually Glacier up on Mt. Rainier. I didn’t know it at the time but this would be one of the few views we would have of the mountain all day.

As we pulled into the Visitors Center,

we noted that the temperature was about 36 degrees rather than the advertised 50 to 60 degrees. Kim had the stocking cap she had purchased the day before and I decided to use the work gloves I had in the truck.

Nothing like being prepared for a 3 hour hike. In our defense, other than the gloves, we had all the other hiking essentials including our first aid kit, emergency blanket and lots of food and water.
The trail was as to be expected when hiking up a mountain, quite vertical for some time but we enjoyed the sunshine and the warmth that comes once you get moving.

As we got higher, the clouds and fog started rolling in on us

and at various points we couldn’t see too far in front of us.

So for you wildlife lovers, a brief aside. We had heard that the Marmots hibernate 8 months out of the year and were bemoaning our chances of seeing one. And, in fact, we didn’t see one, we saw about 15 of them throughout our hike. Kim spotted the first one near the trail and of course we were past excited. It actually didn’t seem to be bothered by us and almost appeared to be posing for me. OK, I got a bit too “into” the Marmots but they were just so damn cute.

We got to Glacier View which was at 3600 feet only to be informed by those coming down that we shouldn’t bother because you couldn’t see anything from the viewpoint. We decided to go up anyway hoping the clouds would shift and provide us a view or two. Sure enough, our timing was perfect!

And within a minute or so, it was gone. OK, it wasn’t gone as much as we couldn’t see it anymore.

We kept hiking and it started getting colder with snow on the ground

and then more snow.

Since it was cold, wet and apparent that we were too socked in to see much of anything, we contemplated heading on down. I am sure it will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that since we had gotten that far, we decided to proceed. After all, the clouds had cleared at Glacier View for us, hadn’t they?
And so, here is the view from Panoramic Point, 7,100 feet up and roughly half way up Mt. Rainier

We hunkered down and ate our sandwiches while watching the intrepid members of the climbing school head up the mountain in the cold with zero visibility. Apparently, being out in that kind of weather is good practice. We had planned to hike down another path but I had gotten cold, the paths were getting more and more snow packed and we did NOT have the right gear on so we decided to head back the way we came. Even though I had heard conditions up in the mountains could change dramatically in a short time, I was still amazed to experience it first hand. Just a side note, as we were headed down, we saw many, many people heading up who were not prepared for the weather. Some had shorts, short sleeves, no water or backpacks. One had on his dress shoes and work blazer. He was of particular interest because he and some of his friends went off trail earlier and Junior Ranger Kim Hodges was not amused.
Did I mention I was cold? My dollar 2.98 gloves were not helping so we hiked down fast. I only stopped to take three pictures on the way down:


We decided to venture into the lodge to get warm and toast our big adventure:

As the sun set on our sunny but not so warm day, we got one last view of the mountain