September 6, 2023: Mt. Rainier & Mt. Saint Helen’s Were a Bust!

Hey folks,

Short post this time since our trip to Mt. Rainier was short and uneventful and our attempt at driving to Mt. Saint Helen’s was a fail.

We pulled into Mt. Rainier National Park on Wednesday, catching a few glimpses of the mountain on the drive in, but clouds covered most of it. We were originally going to spend the night at a campsite, but the road to the campground was closed and the only other campground around was inaccessible for a rig our size. We learned, in talking to an off-duty park ranger, that that there were no hikes in the park that took us to the mountain or gave us beautiful views of it, so we decided to just move on the next morning, after drydocking in a church parking lot in nearby Packwood, WA.

No dogs this time; Try taking a selfie of eight people and two dogs with no selfie stick

Thursday morning, we planned to head to Mt. Saint Helen’s, but the road conditions made Mom a bit nervous, so she flagged down a passing trucker who was hauling logs out of the park. It was a good thing she did! He turned out to be a delightful gentleman who’d been trucking for 30-some-years and driving that particular road long enough to “know when to swerve and miss the potholes.” He informed us that the road further ahead was actually completely out, so we had to ditch that plan also. On the way out of town though, the weather cleared, and we got some wonderful views of Mt. Rainier in the distance! We wanted to head to the Mt. St. Helen’s Visitor Center some two hours away, but that road had been taken out by a glacier slide fairly recently. So it was time to head on toward Port Townsend, WA, where adventure on both land and sea awaited us…but that will have to wait for a future post.

One interesting tidbit we picked up on in Packwood is that everything is considered a mile away. We asked where the Visitor Center was and the answer was ‘bout a mile down the road’… which turned out to be about three miles. When asking where to get a good view of the mountain, the answer was ‘bout a mile outside town’…turned out to be way more than that. When Mom made a comment about this observation to the logging truck driver, he laughed and said that where he comes from in Oklahoma, everything’s ‘a fur piece away.’

Anywho, that’s all for now.

Until next time, God bless!