With an old college friend in town a couple weeks ago, we made a desperate attempt to break out of the lethargy of a cloudy Seattle Saturday morning. With a camera at Mount Rainier showing clear skies and a clear forecast, we jumped in the car and made a dash for the Park. Jeff and Sam were in Seattle from Hong Kong, wrapping up a long roadtrip up the West Coast from San Francisco. Hiking out to Fremont Lookout would get us elevation, beautiful alpine terrain, wildflowers, and spectacular vistas of Mount Rainier with a pretty moderate intensity level… seemingly perfect.
The hike and location have a lot of meaning for Lulu and I, as we wrote our vows at the lookout before our wedding in Colorado. It’s a stunning, inspiring view, and one that we love to share with friends and family coming to town. Except that since we’ve been there, every time we take visitors out there, the views have often been left to the imagination in rolling banks of fog. Even with a beautiful forecast, the swirling clouds and winds around Mount Rainier often tease visitors, with the slightest of windows opening up to the mountain, only to close seconds later in a rush of cold air and thick cloud. At that elevation, the trail itself frequently becomes part of the clouds around it. It’s a cool, eerie sensation, but not particularly stunning of a panoramic show-off when you tell your guests, “You wouldn’t believe how awesome the view is from here, I swear.”
Nonetheless, it’s a great hike, and even the fleeting glimpses afford incredible scenery. Sometimes a constantly changing scene affords more wonder than the static vista, and hopefully we still gave Jeff and Sam some of what they were after on their trip.
Mount Rainier starting out on the Fremont Lookout trail from Sunrise.
Wildflowers starting to develop a thick coat over the alpine.
Jeff, Lulu, and Sam as the fog starts to roll in.
The trail remains pretty incredible, even if the bigger views are obscured.
Great to reunite with Jeff and meet Sam as they neared the end of their roadtrip.
Glacier Basin and Frozen Lake with the Wonderland Trail as we re-emerge from the fog.
Ominous clouds, beautiful sunlight, and wildflowers lend to the eerie and constantly changing feel of the landscape at Rainier.
Just to prove to family and friends that yes, there really is a view there, here’s the view from our original hike out to Fremont Lookout. Maybe next time we’ll bring printouts of those shots for guests to bring along just in case we wind up in the fog again 
