Mount Rainier National Park

The following day we drove from Spokane to the Cougar Campground at Mount Rainer National Park where we also camped for two nights. Mount Rainer looms large well before you arrive and everywhere you look in the park it seems. It is a pretty impressive sight, and the park is also pretty cool. We spent most of our full day in the Paradise area hiking trails to see wildflowers and glaciers. Turns out Glacier National Park is a terrible place to see glaciers these days, but Mount Rainer is still full of them. They are impressive. The snow was still rapidly melting on the mountain and the trails we hiked were only recently accessible. The park rangers had given the girls the junior ranger books as well as a wildflower guide pamphlet, and Alexia was SUPER into finding all the flowers. She found nearly all of the 50 or listed in the brochure, many of which were VERY cool, including the mountain bog gentian. She had a good eye for spotting the different flowers, and the wildflowers were also incredible in the meadows here. There were 1,000s of avalanche lilies in the fields. The melting snow made waterfalls everywhere and we also managed to see marmots and black bears here. In the evening, Alexia and I decided to do one last 3 mile hike to two more waterfalls through some of the big old growth forest. The trail was completely deserted and the trees where HUGE. The waterfalls were pretty but tough to photograph with selfies. Part of the trail was crossing the river on a bridge made out of an old tree trunk. The water was raging underneath, but the bridge seemed pretty stable. Mount Rainer was unexpectedly beautiful.