If you are lucky enough to ever visit Washington State, there are not one, but three amazing national parks within around a two hour drive of downtown Seattle: Olympic, North Cascades, and Rainier. For those of us who live there, we are constantly spoiled with opportunities to get outside. One evening, a good friend of mine texted and asked if I wanted to get out of the city for a day, and less than 12 hours later we were getting in my car and making the trip up to Mt. Rainier National Park.
Leaving at 7am, the journey from my door in suburban Seattle to the Sunrise Visitor Center took us 2 hours and 20 minutes. Sunrise is on the SE side of the mountain, which is the face you can’t see from Seattle, so it’s a fun location for locals who are used to the iconic glaciers on the NW face. If you are planning on doing this trip, make sure to buy your national park pass ahead of time online to speed up getting through the gate. Beware- parking lots at the two main Visitor Centers, Paradise and Sunrise, fill up before 10am on busy summer weekends. We went on a Sunday and surprisingly the line at the gate and the parking lot were relatively chill.
Hoping for some brisk exercise and good views, but not up for being ground into a pulp, we opted for the First Burroughs Mountain Loop, a scenic hike which takes you about as close you can be to the mountain without actually being on it. We originally opted to take the shortest option- only hiking to the First Burrough Mountain- just over 5 miles round trip. The trail continues on along the ridgeline to Second and Third Burroughs mountain, and enticed by the views, ended up continuing on an extra mile to the second peak. We were well rewarded with amazing views and perfect weather.
The hardest part of the trail, aside from the lung-straining 7800ft maximum altitude, was the last mile of the loop trail, which was a quad-burning, unending, moderately sloped slog back up to the parking lot from a small valley, which after 6 miles hurt way more than it should have.
After about 5 hours of hiking, we chilled at the ranger station for a little bit, then made the descent back down the hairpin turns on Sunrise Road and back to Seattle. About an hour into the drive when we reaching sea level again, we both got pretty splitting headaches from the altitude difference but it was totally worth it for an awesome day outside. We reached home around 5:30pm, making this an extremely comfortable day trip. If you were more ambitious (or faster) than us you could accomplish a lot of hiking up there in a day!
Full info on our hike can be found here:
https://www.wta.org/go-hiking/hikes/burroughs-mountain
Hope to see everyone outside in PGH this semester!
- Madeline Cotton, CMUX President