Ranger Falls, Green Lake and Chenuis Falls

 We drove up to the Carbon River Entrance of Mt Rainier National Park to hike to Ranger Falls, Green Lake and Chenuis Falls, combined this was an 11 mile round trip hike with an overall elevation gain of 1,600 ft.
The trail starts along the now closed Carbon River Road, we would walk 3 miles up this gentle incline road to the Ranger Falls and Green Lake trail.

 Besides the beautiful tall trees here, we saw lots of woodland wildflowers in bloom.

 There was also an abundance of ferns and moss.

 These twin flowers growing on the side of a large tree caught my eye,

A view of the Carbon River and Tirzah Mountain can be seen shortly before the turn off to Ranger Falls and Green Lake

 It is another mile with 600 ft gain up to Ranger Falls and additional 0.7 mile with about 400 ft of gain to Green Lake.
Lot of beautiful moss covered trees, ferns and wildflowers line this trail.

 Ranger Falls has an 172 foot drop

 Further up the trail, a log bridge crosses Ranger Creek.

 The water in Green Lake was so still, we had a gorgeous reflection of the trees lining this lake.

 We had to be careful as we ate our lunch, as there was a very bold chipmunk racing around the logs and our feet,

 We hiked back down to the closed  Carbon River road, and went an additional 0.5 mile along the road to find the trailhead to Chenuis Falls. We were happy to see that the log bridge over the Carbon River was in!
It is 0.2 miles to Chenuis Falls from here.

Here the Carbon River is fast, deep and full of glacier silt. There were 3 additional log bridges over the river bed, only two of them had small amounts of water under them and the other was at a currently dry spot. 

 At the far end of the river bed where two additional log bridges. The forest in this section of Mt Rainier National Park is very lush.

Lower Chenuis Falls (168 ft of slides) fall into a beautiful green pool,

From here, we returned across the Carbon River on the log bridges and hiked 3.5 miles back along the closed Carbon River Road to the parking area.








some of the flora and wildflowers we saw in bloom along the trail today: