Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens & some good southern cooking

Wow! What a weekend! Sean and I had originally planned on making a trip to Forks, WA and hike to Second Beach, but we thought we'd save that trip for when we have a little more time. Mount Rainier was the next choice. It's been on our list of things we wanted to see while we're in the area and it's much closer than heading to Forks.

Mt. Rainier from afar

We headed into Mt. Rainier National Park from the Nisqually entrance and headed up to Paradise Area. We wanted to find an easier trail for the kids this time around (the last one ended up being a few miles longer than planned and initially a little steeper than planned) and this area had many easy, short trails.

Kids running down the path.

This guy was pretty happy to finally make it to see Rainier finally :)

Summer wanted to go a little further to try to reach snow and Sean was more than happy to take her a little further with her. She has been nicknamed our "hiking buddy" during a few of our hikes.

In the meantime I took the other three back down and ended up walking over to the Myrtle Falls area.

Myrtle Falls to the right & Mt. Rainier to the back left of the boys.

Sunset as we left Mt. Rainier.

Such a beautiful area even at this time of year! And we were quite lucky that the weather was on our side and the roads were good to go. This time of year it's required that all vehicles carry chains due to weather variability. That would have really screwed up our trip had it been snowing at the mountain on Saturday since we don't have chains.

The weekend adventure continued as we made our way west so we could visit Mount St. Helens the next day. Since we really didn't plan this until Saturday morning, we found a hotel and place to eat in Chehalis that evening.

After filling ourselves with the hotel breakfast, we hit the road and stopped at the Mount St. Helens Visitor Center about 5 miles east of Castle Rock. We watched a video about the eruption and checked out the information they held there.

The negative about visiting this time of year is the fact that many places were closed along the way. I was looking forward to taking the kids to the Forest Learning Center (I had read many great reviews), but it had closed the end of October.

The Science & Learning Center at Coldwater was open so we stopped there to waste a little time hoping that the clouds/weather would clear a bit for us to have a chance at seeing the mountain. We had also noticed that it was getting pretty chilly out. And as expected, it was getting cooler as we gained elevation.

The Johnson Ridge Observatory was also closed, but the road was still open to get to it so we thought we'd take a chance to see the mountain from the viewing point there. No luck. It seemed worse. I did get a shot of Mason and Sean in front of the observatory. We three were the only ones that left the van in an off chance we could see anything. Everyone else didn't want to brave the cold to do the same (we had sweatshirts, gloves and hats, but it had dropped to 40-41 degrees once we arrived at the top).

Below is a snapshot I grabbed from a Mount St. Helens volcano cam two days after we had been there. It gives you a real-time view of the mountain. The shots are taken from the Johnston Ridge Observatory. I can't believe we were soooo close to it and we couldn't see it that day. Makes me sad :(

The idea was brought up to wait it out for awhile to see if things would clear, but how frustrating would that have been if we waited an hour or more and it still was out of sight. I guess there will need to be another visit some day.

Our journey was coming to a close and it was time to start our way back to Woodinville. One thing that we've been wanting to do is to eat at a place that was on the show Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. Sean found one that was in Tacoma called Southern Kitchen. It sounded great and the menu looked good for everyone so we tried it out.

Oh my! Our food was wonderful! No complaints from any of us (I don't think). I would definitely go there again if I'm ever in the area. And the waitress we had was great, which is always a bonus.

That ends our weekend. It was short and sweet, but we packed a lot in and it was a lot of fun!

If you like to look at pictures, I've added links below to our Snapfish albums. The pictures from our day traveling to Mount St. Helens aren't the most exciting because of the weather :( Sorry.

Mount Rainier - Canon

Mount Rainier - iPhone pics

Mount St. Helens - Canon & iPhone