Day 15

Today we traveled from Olympic National Park to Mount Rainier National Park. Mount Rainier is the tallest mountain in the continental U.S., excluding Alaska. We got our first views of it some 60 miles away (using roads, not as the “crow flies”) when we reached Tacoma, Washington. It really is an impressive sight.

When we arrived at the park, we drove to one of the most popular visitor areas, a place known as Paradise. There are excellent views of the mountain here, and many of the more popular hiking trails begin at this location.

As expected, there is no cellular service in the park. In fact, we lost cellular service when we were over 20 miles from the park entrance, and once we entered the park, we travelled another 20 miles to reach our campground.

Tomorrow, we plan to hike the “Skyline” trail. It's a 6 mile trail that ascends more than 1600 feet in the first two miles. It's going to be a very strenuous hike, but we're planning to just take it slow. After that, we may do one or two more shorter, easier hikes, but we'll have to see how the day is going. The weather forecast is calling for afternoon thunderstorms tomorrow, so we'll have to wait and see.

That's about it for tonight … this blog post will have to wait until Saturday morning, when we leave Mount Rainier to head for Crater Lake National Park. I'm not expecting to have cellular service at Crater Lake either, but we will be traveling along I-5 for a good part of the day, passing by Portland, Oregon, so we should be able to stop briefly to post this entry and call home.