THREE HIKING SISTERS, we love to hike together, but we don't all live in the same state. Sometimes it is only two of us, and sometimes we hike with others. This is a record of some of our hikes.
We drove up to Paradise at Mt Rainier National Park to hike the Nisqually Vista Trail, 1.2 miles with 200 ft of overall gain. View of Mt Rainier from the lower parking lot.
The trail is paved and goes through both meadows and forest.
When we reached the loop part of the trail we went counterclockwise. Some views through the trees.
Main view along the loop
zoom of the end of the Nisqually Glacier
Another peekaboo view of Mt Rainier
We drove to the Bench and Snow Lake Trailhead near Reflection Lakes, to hike to the two lakes this morning. We hiked 2.3 miles round trip with 400 ft of overall gain. View of Mt Rainier from the parking area.
View of Unicorn Peak and
Foss Peak from the trail.
Looking down at Bench Lake from the trail.
There were some peekaboo views of Mt Rainier along the trail.
Beautiful reflection of Mt Rainier in Bench Lake.
View of Unicorn Peak from the Snow Lake outlet crossing.
Some views of Mt Rainier as we hike back to the trailhead.
We drove up to the end of Obstruction Point Road in Olympic National Park to hike to Gladys Basin via Lillian Ridge and Grand Valley. Overall our trip was 10.5 miles with 2,600 ft of gain. We saw a nice variety of wildlife along with wildflowers still in bloom.zoom of Mount Olympus from the parking area.
It was 37F when we started our hike at 8:45am, there was frost on some of the plants and grass.
Chimpunk along the trail.
Deer walking by us up on Lillian Ridge.
Another view from Lillian Ridge, and
looking down on some tarns on Lillian Ridge.
View to the southeast, just before the trail starts to descend into Grand Valley.
zoom of distant peaks across Grand Valley
up from a small stream crossing
View of Grand Lake
Views along Moose Lake, as we headed up the trail towards Gladys Basin
We saw several deer near the camping area at Moose Lake.
Looking back down at Moose Lake as we continue up the trail.
Another small stream
We found lots of ripe huckleberries along the trail.
View looking back towards Gladys Lake, as we hiked past it and
a view up towards Grand Pass and Grand Peak.
A tarn near the trail.
The tarns in Gladys Basin, we were careful to step on rocks and avoided stepping on heather and other wildflowers.
some of the frogs in the larger tarn
Another tarn
Small stream with Grand Peak above
Lots of yellow monkeyflowrs by this stream
As we were hiking back down to Gladys Lake, we saw several grouse and
several marmots.
We took the short side trail to Gladys Lake.
Another view of Moose Lake
We saw another 8 or 10 deer back by Moose Lake.
Back up on Lillian Ridge, we had distant hazy views of Mt Baker and Glacier Peak.
More tarns up on Lillian Ridge
As we were driving along Obstuction Point Road on our way our, we saw a couple of young bucks above us.
