From Sunrise to Fire Creek

On the north side of Mount Rainier, there is a loop that uses half of the wonderland trail path coupled with a trail that takes you further north and away from the heavily used wonderland trail.  It passes through high mountain passes as well as three high flat plateau.  It shows evidence of bear activity, it appears the bear are happily eating the huckleberries.  It has challenging ups and downs and as well as views...

We leave the trailhead by 8:50 and arrive at Fire Creek campsite at 3 pm.  A 9 mile hike with 968 feet of up and 2637 feet of down.  It was a real toe banger!

the hike from Sunrise to Berkeley is beautiful.  Lush green grass, meandering creek, tall pines, sunny skies. We stopped at Berkeley Park campground for lunch.  Here we dropped our heavy packs and dug out the sandwiches we made at breakfast.  We had cream cheese with sliced turkey and avocado.  They were amazing! A few of use trumped up the hill aways to use the "privey".  It was merely a brown box sitting up the hill behind a tree.  We hike further along and arrive at an area called Grant Park.  A very large grassy plateau.  Here we see people in the distance so are hiking towards us on the trail.  They had seen a bear and decided to turn back.  We stopped for a pack/snack break before descending the remaining feet of elevation down to Fire Creek.

Fire Creek Group camp is a three-tiered spit of land that was some sort of math question on how to best set up our six tents along with tarped kitchen area.  Kathi and I end up with the lowest of the three tiers spots.  But it was about the only spot that would accommodate our tent.  We all set up our tents and helped get the two tarps up to create a dry space for the kitchen.  Then hiked further down to the creek to gather and filter water for the dinner and next days hike.

At the creek, we learned how to use the gravity Katadyn water filter system.  It was pretty slick and could filter as fast as our without the pumping action.  We hiked back to camp which seemed like a lot of effort after a full day of hiking.  Fire Creek campground is really a couple of flat surfaces dug into the hill.  Nothing easy about staying here.

I do not remember what we had for dinner or breakfast, but I do remember having some tee for supper and having to sneak out of the tent around 10 or 11 at night to go to the bathroom.  It was chilly, it was very dark, and difficult to find a flat spot far enough away from the tents without rolling down the hill.  No worries, I poked Kathi awake and asked her if she needed to go too.  Remember we need to use the buddy system!!!  When poking someone awake you should always say something cute like: are you awake? or now that you are awake...

At around midnight it started to rain, and rain, and rain.  Around 6 am Kathi and I started to notice that we were camping in a lake.  By the time we were up, contacts in, sleeping bags packed, mattresses rolled up it was clear we were closer to Noah's Ark.  Just needed to round up two of each available animal species.  We drained off as much water as we could, packed up the soggy tent and hit the trail.  Things weight a lot more when you are carrying the wet version of them.
I'm sure my pack is around 47-49 pounds today.