Journey Day17- Packwood to Seattle

The last day of our journey. It has been an entertaining and demanding adventure and far from being glad it's over we are ready for it to be over. The flood of input and experience is blurring in the speed of it all which is a shame but one of the benefits of writing a blog is that it helps order and retain many of the memories.

6:45 up today to get into Mt Rainier Park before the crowds and outside our bedroom window an elk mother and her calf are browsing in the early light. We breakfast and get on are way and are at the Steven's Canyon entrance gate for 9am.

The light still has the mistiness of early morning though not really that early and there are multiple layers of hills off into the distance. We stop briefly on the way up a couple of times, one for a deer and her calf across a lake.

 
By 10am we arrive at Paradise, the most popular location in the Park. Aleady, at 10am, the upto 2 hour parking is already full. As we intend a couple of short walks we park in the walkers and overnight parking a little further away.

Our intention was one or two 1 hour walks but things changed as we headed out.
We headed up a short 1 mile return walk to Myrtle Falls but on reaching the end continued for a while because it was so stunningly beautiful.

We have now acclimatised to the altitude which was an issue for us early in the trip and we head up higher feeling fine. Able to see tracks in all directions we consider continuing, we have no water with us but should be off before the peak heat and there are snow melt streams. We do fortunately have our fleeces as the temperatuire drops with height. Able to see a ridge walk that goes back toward the car we check with some rangers working on the path who tell us it is accessible but there is a section of route we can't see yet which stretches around a snow field.

On of our few close wildlife encounters on this trip was with several marmots on this hillside, two babies scurrying over rocks and Ma and Pa sunning themsleves nearby. Pa sprawled out like a bag of peas.

We continue on gaining further height determined we will make a judgement call at the top of the zig-zags. Still not certain, we decide to expolre the ridge a little before returning.
We are looking at fantastic panoramas dotted with volcanic cones and feel sure that one of them is Mount Saint Helens.  We accosted a lone walker who looked as if she probably new the area and she was great pointing out all sorts including the peaks of Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood which I have never heard of but are spectacular and confirming our identification of Mt. St. Helens. Well and correctly equipped, she suggested we'd be fine and kindly gave us a spare map. commenting that we had at least got more on than most people on the ridge. The route on was not a lot further than the retracing our ruote so we went for it.

Across the ridge we were level with the lower glaciers of the peak. We could see groups being trained for avalanche survival before they went up onto the glaciers.

We wandered on in awe close to the glaciers. On this high ridge it got quite cool and became very windy making us glad to have the fleeces with us. There were now lots of people climbing up towards us and we could see a long way below cars parked along oll the roads, the car parks clearly way over capacity on a Sunday afternoon.

this must be one of the highest composting toilets anywhere

 
We eventually decended back to our car arriving about 2:30. Bottles of water downed in a gulp we then picniced off the back of the car again.

Heading down to the Nisqually gate on the west we stopped to admire a grove of massive pine trees.

It was a long run back to Seattle. The extreme uphill in the Park had again thrown fuel calculations and I went for a $3 'splash and dash', still determined not to give the rental company more fuel than necessary (return empty).
We hit heavy interstate (motorway) traffic which I feared would run to Seattle but turned out to be a broken down car in the middle lane. This again reminded me that I feel vulnerable if something goes wrong.

Into Seattle and approaching the hotel we first encounter massive road closures for an event which we have to circumnavigate then, near to the hotel itself, roadworks block our access again.
Relieved and thankful we eventually check in and squeeze our 'truck' as I tend to call it, into the under building car park at 6:45pm.

We walk out to a pizza restaurant where we were delighted with an outside balcony seat watching the Space Needle against a deepening blue sky into darkness. Really nice food, staff and we had our first bottle wine in a while.

Today's Mount Rainier visit will reside in memory a long time.

Today's route:

 

Statistics: Miles today: 133; Miles so far: 3195; Fuel added so far: 111.9 US gals; States: Washington ; Time Zone: Pacific (UK -8)