Wonderland trail/Rampart Ridge trail (7/1)

What a beautiful  day for a hike, the sun is out and the sky is blue and it is warm out already this morning.  We make the short drive to the Longmire visitor center where we pick up the Wonderland trail.  For those of you who don't know this trail, it is a 100 mile trail around Mt Rainier.  This is a trail I dreamed of hiking when I was younger and thought I could do that big of a backpack trip.  Since starting hiking this morning I now know this is not a hike to be taken likely.  We are only on the wonderland trail for 1.8 miles before it joins the rampart ridge trail, but I can see that you either are hiking up hill or down hill, very little flat.  The first 1.8 miles isn't to bad, it let me get warmed up for the next 4 miles of up hill, some moderate some pretty steep.  But the scenery is beautiful.  There is nothing like the smell of the forest!!!!!!

 I was feeling pretty tired when we stopped for our first break.  It had been a really long up hill to get here.  It felt so good to sit down for a little while.  Once back on the trail we started to go down hill.  I thought this can't be good if we have to go back up it!.  It seems the ridge we were following drops down for a while then starts back up.  We came upon a beautiful little waterfall just where the trail starts to go up.


We start going up and before long we are in the snow, just patches at first then it gets pretty snowy.













We keep hiking but it wasn't long before the snow got pretty deep and we were walking on top of it, we were following someone's foot prints.  Then there were no foot prints, but we didn't let that deter us, we tried to go further.  It didn't take long before we knew we needed to turn around.  The snow is slushy and slippery and lots of steep drop offs not what we were ready for.  We retraced out steps back until we came to a switch back that we didn't remember taking.  Joe went a head and I kind of followed, but we both knew this wasn't right.  Again we backed tracked a little ways when Joe saw our mistake.  He stepped on something and in looking closer he saw it was the top of the trail sigh buried in the snow, no wonder we didn't know where we were!

We found a nice sunny spot with a spectacular view to have lunch.

Time to head back down.  I have never done such a long continuous down hill in my life.  You don't realize how steep the up hill was until you go down it.  My knees were screaming at me about half way out. I didn't think we would ever reach the trail junction. We finally made it and decided to go to the right and continue down the rampart ridge trail and make a loop out of the hike.  We were one the wonderland trail for .2 miles to the next turn off. I was not happy when I saw it said Longmire 3 miles.  If we had gone the other way it was only 2 miles.  I was happy that it was at least mostly flat for a ways.  There was a viewpoint at 1.5 miles.  This it the last view of the mt. for today.

We still had 1.5 miles to go and the down hill started.  I thought I'd never walk again by the time we got to the truck.  My feet, knees and lower back were screaming at me not to move. All that pounding down hill had taken it's toll on me.
Even with the ending pain this hike was well worth it.  To celebrate making it back in one piece I had a bottle of Moose Drool Beer.  It was actually pretty good.  At least I didn't lose my sense of humor!!!!!!