Mt. Rainier

After our visit to Mt. St. Helens, we spent the night at the Paradise Inn on Mt. Rainier.

There really isn’t any reason to stay at the Paradise Inn beyond the location. The food is only okay to meh at ripoff prices, the bed is okay, and the walls are paper-thin. We hauled our luggage up the stairway to our room and met a hallway with a rather generic look to it that reminded me of my college dormitory. I wasn’t really expecting a dropped ceiling in a place constructed of timber in 1916. The tiny room would be suitable for sleeping, if the walls weren’t so thin that I stayed up most of the night listening to the snoring next door and all of the movement in the hallways. Never did I want to punch through a wall so badly.

The next morning, I gave up on sleeping at sunrise and saw the summit of Mt. Rainier from our room window. After a rather standard breakfast buffet and a frightening amount of coffee, we set out for the hiking trails. They’re well marked and we opted for some of the easier routes. At the top of the waterfall pictured above, we could walk close to a marten sunning itself on the rocks lining the trail. However, my SD card glitched out and I couldn’t get a picture of it while sitting just across the trail from it.

The easiest rated route, the Nisqually Loop, had few other hikers on it, to our surprise and delight. It also had commanding views of the mountain that my camera couldn’t hope to capture in a single shot.

After the disappointing night at the Paradise Inn, the hike on Mt. Rainier more than made up for it. I ended up with so many notes for an upcoming project.