Skyline Loop, Mount Rainier National Park

Skyline Loop, Mount Rainier National Park

I guess I've lost my marbles over this hiking thing. I got up at 7am, earlier than I normally do to go to work. I was out the door by 8:30am, which is about when I'd leave for work, but I did a couple things to prepare for the day that I wouldn't normally do. Then I drove 100 miles (each way) to hike in Mount Rainier National Park for six miles in inclement weather, unable to get the usual stunning vistas that can be seen on a clear day. All that, and I had a perfectly good time. Crazy, really.

I haven't had a chance to get to the photo album creation yet, but I'll post again in the next day or two when I do. In the meantime, the photo above really captures the feel of the hike today. It was wet and rocky on a trail winding up to well above the treeline, twisting its way to and into a cloudy sky. My GPS tells me my I climbed about 1845 feet to a maximum elevation of 7065 feet, roughly half the height of Mount Rainier's summit, which is a bit over 14,000 feet. I travelled about 6.7 miles in horizontal distance.

It's interesting that when I first started doing this hiking thing, five or six miles was a pretty long hike and challenging. Now, today's hike seemed almost short. Nine or ten seems to be about right for me, and even that's growing as last week's trip to Goat Lake was longer than that and I recovered from that pretty quickly.

The new hiking boots also worked out really well. I think I bought those just in time, as today's trail was pretty rocky. There were a few points where I aimed for a bunch of specifically pointier rocks just to test out the soles of the boots. What an amazing difference! My now discarded Thom McAn's would have left me feeling every spike - I swear I could read Braille through those things. The new Timberland's, though, are tough stuff and dealing with rocks was only about balance, not pain. OK, I guess there was still a little pain, as they aren't fully broken in yet, although I wore them to work a couple times this week and that seems to have helped.

Another big difference between a Mount Rainier hike and a hike like Goat Lake was the number of people present. There were huge buses unloading people at the bottom. For the first mile or so after leaving the parking lot, the trails are actually paved. It feels a little silly walking along behind some guy carrying nothing and wearing sandals on his feet when you have on hiking boots and are carrying a pack that weighs about 12 pounds (like mine) containing enough gear you could spend an uncomfortable but safe night out in the wilderness if you had to. This particular trail goes up pretty high, though, so after a bit the only people left around were a Boy Scout troop, some people practicing mountaineering by climbing through snowpack instead of on the trail, and a few other folks in groups of one to three. The last bit is again on pavement (since it's a loop) and then there were points I had to say, "Excuse me" a few times to get through a big knot of young Japanese tourists clustered on the trail with umbrellas.

Anyone actually reading this far will have noticed I wrote, "snowpack" in that last paragraph. Yes, it's July and I walked through some snow at one point. According to the park rangers, the snow level is currently at about 8000 feet, but there are still pockets of snow down as far as about 6000 feet, including on the Skyline.

All-in-all, this was a good hike, but not a great one. I'll need to try it again on a clear day and add in the side hikes that are available, like Pebble Creek, to put some extra distance on it. Then, I expect it will be great.