Westside Road, South Puyallup To Klapatche, South Puyallup To Wonderland, Gobblers Knob

On Thursday we drove to Longmire to get permits for a two night hike. Unfortunately, our desired campsites (Klapatche Park and South Puyallup River) where booked, so we settled on spending our first night at North Puyallup River and our second night at Lake George.

This demanded us to hike 10.6 miles from the Westside Road trail head to the North Puyallup River via the old Westside Road, with the exception of taking Round Pass Trail, and a small detour to Denham falls which broke up the monotony of road hiking. In fact, I was surprised to find out that the North Puyallup River campsite is built on the old road bed. This meant the entire trail was gradual elevation gains and losses. The only difficulties was a small 1 mile section of the North Puyallup Trail which was overgrown. Apparently the trail crew that was "mowing" down this section of trail stopped 2/3rds of the way in. Even though I was in shorts, I didn't get beat up to badly, and it certainly wasn't bad enough to require a machete.

The North Puyallup River Campground is in a bit of a "hole" which means it doesn't get a lot of sunlight and GPS signals are weak. That night we had two other groups that where doing the full wonderland trail camping with us.

The next morning was our most difficult day. ~2,000 feet of elevation gain hiking 2.8 miles (but on my GPS watch it thought it was only 2 miles) up to Klapatche Park. This hill is all north facing which made it nice and cool. We encountered a few snow patches, but nothing to bad. At the top, the view was absolutely stunning! The alpine meadows meld with alpine lakes and spectacular Mt. Rainier vistas. This is what we came to soak in, so we dilly-dallied and ate lunch between Klapatche Park and St. Andrews Lake, but at last, it was getting close to 2PM and we still had a good 7 miles of hiking to do, so we descended the ridge and went to the South Puyallup Campground. Between St. Andrews Lake and the South Puyallup campground there are a few tricky snow fields where you can get lost if you are not paying attention... and if it had been icy, I would have felt much less comfortably traversing these sections.

At the South Puyallup campground we had to say goodbye to the wonderland trail and hike the South Puyallup Trail to Rounds Pass, then Rounds Pass to Gobblers Knob trail and camp at Lake George. There is some nice columnar basalt not more than 0.1 miles off the wonderland trail. This is a very beautiful rock formation, and definitely a worthwhile diversion if you are planning on sticking to the wonderland trail.

We got into Lake George at about 5PM, set-up camp and ate dinner. From Lake George, the view of Mt. Rainier is obscured by trees, but it does give you a taste of what the vista is like from Gobblers Knob. So, I put on my sandals and hiked the 1,000 feet of elevation/1.6 miles up to Gobblers Knob as fast as I could so there would be enough sunlight to get back off the Knob before sunset. This took me about 40 minutes at a brisk pace. There are a few snow fields along this trail. One snow field is over the outlet of a very small lake. Be careful to traverse over the snow covered bridge to avoid falling into the creek.

The view at Gobblers Knob was arguably the best view of Mt. Rainier all day. Up at Klapatche Park you are almost "to close" to the mountain, but the view from Gobblers Knob is still close enough to be "in your face".

The next morning we hiked back out to the Westlake Road trail head in under 2 hours.

Note that bugs are an issue everywhere, so be sure to bring DEET.