We got a late start to the day. We had planned on that. I had to do some work, so that ate time. Also, we applied heat to my knee last night, and that only made it worse. I woke up at 2AM with pain and swelling. The swelling persisted most of the day.

After we packed up, we went to a nearby coffee shop for a quick breakfast and to plan the day. The barista visits Mt. Rainier often and let us see a topo map of the park as well as giving us some suggestions. We scrapped the original plan to go to Mowitch and opted to do the main route of Paradise and Longmire.

We arrived at the park and were quickly confronted with the sheer enormity of Rainier. As we kept driving, we felt less inclined to really do any hiking. Rainier is a popular park and it has one real main attraction – it’s as if Crater Lake were combined with Yellowstone.

We stopped at the Paradise Visitor Center, stamped the passport, and looked around. We decided that an easy day would be good as we still need to recover from Glacier. We did a 1 mile hike (round trip) to some falls, got some pictures, and left.

We’re a bit burnt out now from the road trip and the sights; the planned 3 day break in Corvallis is much needed and couldn’t come soon enough.

After we left, we drove towards the Olympic Peninsula. We pushed and, at 10PM, got to the Deer Park campground in Olympic. The views on the drive towards Olympic were impressive – the sun was behind the peaks leaving just a mountain shaped void on the horizon with a pink/purple sunset sky above.

Tomorrow: Drive around Olympic, take some (lots of?) pictures, perhaps camp in the rain forest portion.

STATS: 12 days, 7 national parks, 6 hikes, 45 miles