Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Mt. Rainier National Park, WA

We are staying in Packwood near Mt. Rainer for a week to check out the park.  We drove up onto the mountain today to go to the Henry M Jackson Memorial Visitors Center and ask about hikes and it was like being in Glacier NP....just awesome! I can already tell we won't have enough time here and will have to return.  It is beautiful!  Oh, and Mt. Rainier has about 26 glaciers!



We saw several waterfalls on our way up the mountain:



 The entire area is like a huge garden, dozens of different types of wildflowers everywhere!










The Grove of the Patriarchs Nature Trail takes you to an area with the oldest trees in the park.  They rival the redwoods in size!



Douglas Firs
 Mike is looking at a giant cedar:
 All the trees you see here are growing out of the tree trunk of a fallen tree.  But there are several different kinds of trees!

 These pics are from the Silver Falls Trail and all these beautiful falls are along about a 1 mike stretch of the Ohanapecosh River.


 Not long after getting back to Packwood we were visited by 3 young buck elks at our park.  Looks like this could be a daily thing:)

2 comments:

  1. WOW! What a day! Obviously Mt Ranier MUST go on our to do list! Great timing on the flowers too!

    ReplyDelete

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