If you only have a couple hours…
it’s still totally worth it to stop for a day trip in Rainier! We would be driving right by Rainier on our road trip to Yellowstone & Grand Tetons (full details on that HERE), seemed like an easy opportunity to get a third National Park out of one trip! My other thought, it would take us 3 hours to get to Rainier which gives us a break in our first 6-hour drive day, right smack in the middle! BUT this means we only had a few hours in Rainier before we had to hit the road so we wanted to make the most of it!
The first thing we learned about Rainier is you have to put in a specific Visitors Station into Google Maps. I loaded up what showed as “Rainier National Park” thinking “that’s’ it!” Turns out, once you get into the park you actually have several options all around the mountain for activities, ranger stations, etc. SOOO, what I thought would be an easy stop turned into a quest to find any ranger station at all in the vast wilderness of Rainier! If we didn’t have the clock ticking down the rest of our travel day, this would have been less stressful so I’d just say, learn from my poor planning on this one and know your actual starting location! I highly recommend Paradise but just plan for the time it takes to get there.
One of the main attractions I wanted to get to was Myrtle Falls. This 1-mile out and back walk is kid friendly and has a great attraction at the end. We’ve been on a bit of a waterfall kick this year trying to get the kids into hiking so this would be right on theme! The trailhead to Myrtle Falls starts at the Paradise Visitor Center, aptly named for the beautiful views of the Nisqually Glacier, the lush forest covered in wild flowers, and the crystal clear creek. A true mountain paradise.
The entire Skyline Trail Loop would be too much for our kiddos and our time constraints, but from Myrtle Falls there is another falls, Sluiskin Falls, 1.3 miles father via the Skyline Trail. This destination gave us more time to enjoy the mountain and a more reasonable distance (3.6 miles when all said and done). Once we got past Myrtle Falls the crowds thinned out quite a bit giving us more room to stretch our legs. Along the way we met a Marmot, our first wildlife sighting of the trip, and he was promptly named Bobby! This was a very exciting encounter that the boys would talk about for quite a while after!
After our hike it’s back to the ranger station to finish up our Junior Ranger books and swear our oath to protect our National Parks. We’d talk a lot about what this oath means over the course of the trip, Rainier in particular gave fodder to this conversation with their “no picking the wildflowers” rule. Leave No Trace can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. By taking part in these Junior Ranger programs we get a chance to really dive into what that means: to leave nature as it is, to pick up our trash, to not disturb the wildlife, to stay on the trail. All of these things are so counter to the instinct to take what we want and act rashly without regard of consequences. Who knows how much those talks sink in, but hopefully over time our boys will come to realize what those oaths mean, what is actually required to be stewards of this world God left for us to tend.
Oaths complete, badges in hand, we head off to continue our adventure! Yellowstone here we come!
