Drove up to Mt Rainier National Park, to hike up to Comet Falls, Van Trump Park and beyond on the unmaintained trail. We did about 8+ miles round trip with 3,400 ft of elevation gain. This unmaintained trail does not have an "end", but is not well defined when it reaches the rocky area above the tree line. We hiked up in the clouds, hoping they would lift so we would have views of Mt Rainier, but that didn't happen today. We enjoyed the waterfalls, the wildflowers and the hike!
The trailhead is along the road between Cougar Campground and just before Christine Falls.
The trail starts off climbing uphill, and is a fairly steady uphill trail.
0.3 miles from the trailhead, a bridge crosses Van Trump Creek above Christine Falls. View upstream
view downstream, the road can be seen in the distance.
In the next 1.7 miles, there are views of Van Trump Creek. The water has shaped the rocks beautifully.
One of the scree fields we passed along the trail. We saw a couple of pikas here in the afternoon when hiking back down the trail.
There are some small waterfalls that can be seen along Van Trump Creek.
A
bout 2 miles from the trailhead, a bridge crosses Falls Creek, with a view of Van Trump Falls.
About 0.25 miles further on, there is usually a nice view of Comet Falls, this morning we had to hike further up the trail to see the small falls below Comet Falls and
this was the view we had of 320 ft Comet Falls where the trail starts going up towards Van Trump Park.
About 0.5 mile and 500 ft gain, the spur trail to Van Trump Park is reached. The views in the mist were beautiful.
Much easier to focus on the flora, when the views are obscured.
The maintained trail heads after 0.3 miles, but a well worn boot track is easy to follow for quite a ways.
As we reached the upper portions of Van Trump Park, there were many wildflowers in bloom,
so beautiful!
As we hiked along the ridge above the tree line, we had snow fields to the east side.
We met a couple of hikers, seen high up on the ridge in this photo. We all headed up toward the rounded hill up to the left.
Looking back down the ridge toward the end of the tree line below, mostly hidden in the clouds.
No obvious trail as the ridge turned very rocky. We needed to be careful of the loose rocks.
We found a nice place to sit, waited for an hour, but the clouds did not lift above us. This was the best view we had up high today.
As we hiked back down through Van Trump Park, the clouds began to lift above us (but not high enough to reveal Mt Rainier).
These views of the park are still beautiful.
We could now see the lower portions of Van Trump Park below us and clear down into the valley with Nisqually River.
In the afternoon, we could see the Tatoosh Range and far beyond, the lower flanks of Mt Adams.
In the afternoon we had great views of Comet Falls
View of Comet Falls from the base.
Clear view of Comet Falls from down the trail.
Clearer view of Van Trump Falls in the afternoon.
Some of the wildflowers and other flora we saw along the trail today;
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Clear view of Comet Falls from down the trail.
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