What a beautiful day to be in the mountains!
We arrived to meet our group in Longmire at 9:15am. If there was a backup waiting for the gate to open, we arrived late enough for it to clear out and there was no one around. Restrooms were cold but well stocked with TP and soap. Note that the water in the sink in the women's restroom is COLD!!! The drive was clear and bare with some icy patches, especially around the Nisqually Glacier bridge heading up to Paradise. We strategically parked in the lower parking lot to give ourselves room to spread out and gear up. There weren't too many cars parked there so we had the area to ourselves when we arrived about 10am.
Our route: We took the Nisqually Vista trail for less than a tenth of a mile and turned right to head into the Deadhorse Creek basin then connected higher up on part of the Alta Vista and Skyline trails to Glacier Vista. We chose to stay off the main route out of Paradise so it was more peaceful and we could enjoy our surroundings.
Deadhorse Creek Basin: A short snowshoe of maybe two tenths of a mile from the lower parking lot will get you to the lip of the basin with beautiful full views of Mt. Rainier. The basin has a lot of places to have fun traveling the ups and downs of the small hills and there's lots of open spaces to enjoy the sun. This is one of a few areas that people can winter camp with permits so be on the lookout for groups of winter campers. We didn't see any but thought there probably was quite a few on Mazama Ridge with the nice weather.
Alta Vista & Skyline: After coming out of Paradise proper, this is the main route that most people take to go higher. After we joined here, the trail widened substantially, and you could see each hill clearly. As we got higher, Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Adams came into view. The Tatoosh Range looked like glaze on a cake it was so shiny!
Glacier Vista: We left the masses headed to Panorama Point and turned left to find a nice flat spot to have our lunch and enjoy the sunshine. Highly recommend this vantage point, as you can see the more ambitious folks climbing their way up to Panorama Point while you get just as nice of a view without all the effort. During our lunch break we also could see Mt. Hood way off in the distance. Towards the end of our lunch a light wind started kicking up that made us wrap up our lunch and put some extra layers on.
We probably could have done this in microspikes like many others we saw, but we're all backpackers and we use the winter season to condition for summer so it was a great chance to get some training in on such a beautiful day. Round trip we clocked about 3 miles and about 900 ft of gain which took us about 3 hours and 45 minutes with about a half hour lunch break, many rest breaks, photo ops, and several clothing adjustments.
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