Mount Rainer

Burien, WA - Enumclaw, Wa
11/Jun/24 - 13/Jun/24

Miles Traveled     34
Trip Total          5306
Travel Time       1:29

States visited: FL, GA, AL, MS, LA, TX, NM, AZ, UT, NV, CA, OR, Washington

Another very short drive, while it was only 34 miles it still took 90 minutes.  There were two goals in coming to Enumclaw.  The first it was time to get out of the city, Burien Elks location was great for exploring but that is all it had to offer.  The second reason was to get closer to Mount Rainer.  We are going to spend a day exploring the mountain, and this saves us three hours of driving.

We arrived at Enumclaw Expo Center RV Park (County Fairgrounds) well before the check-in time, but since our sites were empty we were able to check-in.  We have found that may  county fairgrounds have fairly inexpensive camping available. Some are no more than a dirt parking lot with electric and maybe water, some like Enumclaw are much nicer.  Enumclaw Expo Center has a very nice campground.  The sites are large with paved pads and with water and electric. It was definitely a great find.  It is also one of the few campgrounds where we are allowed to wash our RV's!  In addition to washing the RV, I took advantage of some free time to change the oil in it.  Mark changed the oil for me while we were back in New Jersey, and we have driven over 5000 miles since then.  When Mark changed the oil, he also replaced the drain plug with a "FUMOTO" valve.  This valve made changing the oil very easy.  Attach a hose to the valve, place the hose in a container and ten minutes later the oil was drained without spilling a drop.

Wednesday we spent the day exploring Mount Rainer, once again we used the Shaka Guide audio tour.  The Shaka guide has four starting points for the Mount Rainer tour, one of which is Enumclaw.  The Enumclaw starting point was less than a mile from our campground which is one of the reason we chose to stay at the Expo Center.  The first stop of the tour was still closed for the season, Rising Sun Road is one of two roads in the park that is not open because of  snow. We still find it hard to comprehend that in the middle of June roads are still closed because of snow.  It is not just the snow on the roads, they do not open the roads until there is not any chance of an avalanche. Leaving the Rising Sun Road area we continued on the tour stopping at around 6 of the 19 stops on the tours.  Many of the stops are hikes, with most of them being "Difficult", we skipped all of the hikes this time.

  Shaka Guides suggest taking 1 to 3 days to do all of the stops, we only have one day so we had to pick and choose where we stopped.  At our next stop Shaka Guide promised a great view of the mountain top, and told us the views were only going to get better.  Wow they were right!!!!   

Over all we took eight hours and drove over 150 spectacular miles around the base of the mountain. We stopped at places like Skookum falls, where the Skookum Creek drops 250 feet down the side of the mountain, Box Canyon a 180 deep slot canyon cut by the Cowlitz River and surround by a lichen covered hillside, Reflection Lake to see the peak of Mount Rainer mirrored in the thawed portion of the lake, The Nisqually River and the boulder strewn valley cut by the glacier,  and several overlooks just to see the different sides of the snow covered peak.

On the ride back to Enumclaw we saw another unusual roadside warning sign to add to the many we have already seen.  This one was a Volcano Evacuation Route, the scary part was this was what we thought was several miles from the base of the mountain.  Hopefully we are long gone before the next eruption.  We arrived back at the Expo Center just as Enumclaw High School graduation was starting.  We timed it just right, we were warned that the graduation traffic would make getting into the campground very difficult from 5pm to 7pm, we returned at 6:55pm!  We also got to listen to the ceremony and cheers from out campsites.

Thursday we had an easy going day of running a couple of errands.  Friday we are heading to Ellensburg WA,   Katie, a friend of mine offered her sister Ellen's 40 acre farm for us boondock for the night.