Here Come the Mountains Again!

Well if Ashley thought we were done with high elevations she was wrong...On Day 7 we went to Mt. Rainier. We spent the night camping in Olympia so it was only about an hour and a half to the mountain. When we finally made it to the park Ashley was incredibly relieved to realize that although we were driving up a mountain there were very few if any cliff edge roads! As we drove into the park we followed the Nisqually River which was this huge rocky riverbed with a small channel of water flowing through it. As more snow melts the river will fill but for us it was incredibly beautiful and you could see lots of debris from previous Lahars (mud flows coming off of the volcano). As we went higher and higher up the mountain the snow appeared, and man was this a lot of snow. As you can see in the picture below it was a pretty thick layer of snow. The road was lined with snow markers at least 14 feet high so that the snow plows can tell where the road is when they finally plowed. Now the crazy part was it was roughly 55-60 degrees out that day and as we hiked around it got pretty warm. So here we are hiking around on a volcano in t-shirts, walking around on several feet of snow! The warm temperature made the snow pretty soft so you take a step and you sink half an inch and the next step you would sink about calf deep. Very difficult to walk on and of course we were too cheap to rent snow shoes so we just toughed it out. Totally worth all the hard work to see the glaciers on Mt. Rainier! If you notice Ashley is wearing her I Heart Glaciers T-shirt in the photos (Thank you Nicole Wood!). If you look closely you can see the entrance to a glacier cave on the Mountain! After fully exploring we started to make our way back down off the Mountain and came across several different waterfalls! We have a lot of pictures and it was with out a doubt one of our favorite stops along the trip!

-The A-Team