We’ve Decided Not to Have Children or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Hike the Wonderland Trail without the Kids
Wonderland Trail Basics
I learned about this trail relatively recently, while I was looking for a PNW trip that would simultaneously provide a little challenge and provide a wetter, greener environment compared to our normal Sierra stomping grounds. Em really latched onto it, in part because of the name (which, I think was enough for her), and in part because of the difficulty. The downside is that we had to leave the kids behind with the grandparents for almost 2 weeks (including transit and permit time).
There are lots of other blogs that cover the Wonderland trail, so I won’t perambulate other than to say that it is simply a circumnavigation of Mt. Rainier, about 100 miles and has a damn lot of elevation change. The best descriptor that Em found compared it to hiking around the rim of a crimped pie crust - it was apt.
Getting a Permit
As with so many trails these days, it’s very hard to get a permit (“Have you read ‘Wild’?”). It seems to me that the problem is even worse in Oregon/Washington than the Sierra because the ratio of connected public lands to private land is lower in the PNW and it is thus harder to tie together enough miles for a good multi-day hike. But I’m hypothesizing.
In any event, the Wonderland Trail permits are some of the hardest to get in the nation (or so I read). As usual for popular trails, 70% of permits are awarded in early spring by a lottery process, and 30% are reserved for walkups. Making it harder though is the way in which they control back country use - a permit is NOT for trailhead entry, as it is in most of the rest of the mountain west, instead, the permit is a series of campground reservations on a particular night. Each campground has between 2 and 8 campsites from which the 30% walkup must be taken, so most campgrounds have 2,1 or no campsites available for walkup. Last rule, the walkup permit can start at most one day after the permit is obtained, and because the Wonderland trail shares permits with other, shorter backpacking trips in the park, the trick is to find a chain of the first two to three campsites/nights that are reasonably spaced in miles.
Long story short(ish), we got up at 5 am, followed Sally and John (more on them later) out of the National Forest where we’d camped (yay, free camping!) and beat them through the parking lot just to be SECOND in line. The Longmire Wilderness Permit center publishes the remaining campsites, so after lamenting the apparent impossibility of chaining together any itinerary at all, I was able to devise a plan, and when Ranger Patrick (ever after known as St. Patrick, Patron Saint of Permits) opened the station, I rapid fired the list to him and in 2 minutes, walked out with a comfortable, 10 day, 9 night Wonderland Trail permit!
Pretty OK itinerary
Sally and John: An Aside
After we got into line first, in front of Sally, she ran an extended commentary on how John didn’t get up early enough and they weren’t going to be able to do the trail. I offered to let them go first, to which she replied, and I quote exactly, “Nah”. Congruent with that reply, I went into the permit office second, which Em reported greatly angered Sally. As we walked through the parking lot with our permit, Em whispered, “Wow, she’s really mad at you. I hope we don’t run into them on the trail!”
We had the same trailhead start, hiking direction and campsites for 4 nights. Cooooool.
The Route
We started at the Box Canyon TH, and added the Spray Park alternative route. We had planned on 9 nights to keep the daily miles at about 10, but in the first few days it became clear that this was a mistake - 10 miles just isn’t that far to walk, but because of the permit system, we were locked into the low miles per day and ended up taking several hours for lunch by creeks. Another irritation made evident by this miles/itinerary lock in, was that there aren’t that many side trails to explore and the rangers are hyper discouraging of off trail travel. Soooo, mostly we just sat around with our feet in the creek.
The other big bummer about the camps was that they kind of sucked. I’m used to picking a site with either an amazing view for a good night, or protection for bad nights. When the weather is good and you can pick a site with a great view, it makes for a phenomenal evening - sunset, stars, sunrise. All the Wonderland Trail sites appear to have been designed for maximum protection and are nestled into forested pockets that have zero view - great in a storm, but otherwise lame. Wonderland campsites: 1 out of 5 stars.
Anyway, by the 8th night, (1) Em missed the kids and (2) we woke up to unpleasant smoke from the nearby (Chinook?) fire. So by wifely fiat, we skipped the last campsite (“SUMMERLAND. The crown jewel of the Wonderland!”) and walked all the way back to the car. I’m pretty sure that the third major motivation for this was that Em wanted to see if she could walk the 22+ miles from Sunrise Camp to Box Canyon in one day - myself, I’ve done similar before, I know I can and I know it sucks. But off we hiked.
The Wonderland Trail altitude profile. Again, credit to GPS Visualizer (which is amazing) for the GPS->alt lookup and the plotting.
Thoughts on the Trail Itself
The Wonderland Trail is wonderful (poetry by Brian). It’s got rainforest, alpine meadows, glaciers, snow covered passes - and we had the gamut of weather, from 2 inches of rain in a night to blistering 95° days to dry off. Plus, I always love the spectacle of a big rock/chunk of ice and the two glaciers that have near approaches from the trial were real-time examples of mountain destruction - in a few minutes of watching, we saw a dozen collapses that dumped rock and mud into the river (hence the yummy muddy color). More unnerving was crossing the glacial braid on the surprisingly rotted national park service log bridges and hearing (more like feeling?) boulders bouncing around in the current. At least one of those bridges resulted in a very bad day for someone after the hand railing collapsed (yikes). Oh, and wild berries - enough to get sick on every day, but pictures are better than my prose, so here:
A Wet Start
Clearing Weather
After about 2 inches of overnight rain at Golden Lakes, the weather started to clear and turned to several days of perfect temps when we started up into Spray Park. Unfortunately, the previous rain meant that we missed most of the meadow flowers in Klapatche Park and Indian Henry’s Hunting Ground.
I saw Andrew Jackson take a panned video when a picture, even a pano couldn’t possibly catch the stupendous feeling of the scene. I’ve been trying it out. Brilliant.
It’s the Berries
Em already mentioned the berries, but there were soooooo many. Currants, red and blue huckleberries, lowbush and highbush blueberries, salmonberries, thimbleberries, lingonberries (this is starting to sound like a previous post’s list).
The Final Stretch
After cresting Skyscraper Pass, we entered the substantially drier, east side of the mountain. The phone was nearly dead, so I didn’t get any pictures from Berkeley Park, but I’d like to return there earlier in the season as it was clear that at some moment in the spring, the lupine covering the meadow sweep of Berkeley Park is an astonishing azure. When we passed through, it was all seed pods ready to burst.
That creek actually does plunge off a cliff just behind her. Not that comfortable a crossing, even for me.
Did it. Self-five.
