Backpacking Mount Rainier National Park

The Big Outside Trip Planner: Backpacking Mount Rainier’s Northern Loop

A backpacker on Mount Rainier National Park's Northern Loop.
A backpacker on Mount Rainier National Park’s Northern Loop.

Welcome to The Big Outside’s Trip Planner for backpacking the Northern Loop in Mount Rainier National Park.

This planner describes how to plan and execute a backpacking trip on Rainier’s 37.2-mile Northern Loop, the trip featured in my story “Completely Alone Backpacking Mount Rainier’s Northern Loop” at The Big Outside. That story includes photos from this trip.

Read on

My kids in Spray Park, Mount Rainier National Park.

Video: Backpacking Mount Rainier National Park

By Michael Lanza

Mount Rainier National Park presents a multitude of excellent backpacking options. But one that encapsulates the experience well, shows off some of the park’s highlight views, glaciers, and wildflower meadows, and can be knocked off in a weekend is the traverse from Mowich Lake to Sunrise. Hiking below Rainier’s north face makes it look so impossibly big it seems unreal, rising 8,000 to 11,000 vertical feet above hikers on trails. Few North American peaks have visible relief of two vertical miles. You naturally react as you might to a full-blown, heat stroke-induced hallucination: Compelled to believe your eyes, you nonetheless struggle with the nagging intuition that the delicate fruit that is your frontal lobe has spoiled badly in the heat.

Read on

Wildflowers, Waterfalls, and Slugs at Mount Rainier

By Michael Lanza

We hike slowly but steadily uphill in the cool shade of Pacific silver fir and Alaska yellow cedar draped in Spanish moss. With melting snow swelling every river, stream, and rivulet in the 470 miles of waterways within the boundaries of Mt. Rainier National Park, the Cascade Range erupts in a riot of greenery all around us. The forest is a happy drunk on an H2O bender.

Read on