Spray Park — Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2022

Wanting to avoid the continual road construction on Highway 410 and inspired by all those early morning trip reports from LittleAngelsMollie I met my sidekick Jeno in Maple Valley at 3:30 this morning and we headed down to the NW corner of Mt Rainier to hike up to Spray Park.    As others have mentioned the bridge over the Carbon River now has a traffic light to regulate the cars going over it.  On the way up it was so early we had no wait and on the way  down the wait was maybe 2 minutes max.

I timed us this morning going up the long dirt road to Mowich Lake and it took us 40 minutes on the way up and about 35 minutes on the way down.  The road is in pretty good shape, some wash boarding in places but the potholes were minimal and some really smooth spots where you could actually get above 30 MPH like 32 MPH!

There were about 40-50 cars parked when we got up there a little before 5:00 AM but we were able to secure a parking spot not too far from the campground.  The bathrooms were clean and stocked and some of the best we've seen this summer.  I don't know if it was hiking in the dark via headlamp or what but both Jeno and I commented it seemed like there was more downhill hiking out to Spray Falls then we remember from our past trips on this trail.  As we hiked along my buddy said we might be able to get up to Spray Park at sunrise so we pushed a little bit heading up the switchbacks above Spray Falls and although we were up there in time for sunrise the trees obscured our view so we had to settle for seeing Mt Rainier a few minutes after sunrise.  

We were not too far into Spray Park and I  was about 10 yards in front of Jeno when I turned a corner in  the trail and less than 10' away (it was dang close) I see this big face staring at me.  A young Black Bear albeit brownish in color.  We stared at each other for a second and I hollered to Jeno "Bear!"  As soon as I said that he took off into the bushes.  We could hear him crashing around and waited for a bit and he popped out and went back to eating which is what he was doing when I came face to face with him.  He was between 20-30 yards away from us the whole time but after the initial shock of seeing me and I him he didn't pay any attention to us and continued to eat.  We said goodbye to Yogi and continued on our way as the views opened up.  A lot of the flowers especially Lupine are at the prime right now in our opinion.        We continued up the trail running into a couple of hard snow/ice patches the higher we went.  We finally decided to stop as we climbed into the rocks and made that our turn around point for the day.

We had a commanding view from where we stopped and my eagle eyed friend could see Mt Baker and Glacier Peak to the north and downtown Seattle to the west.   We started back down hoping to see the bear again but he was long gone.   We didn't see our first hikers until we were almost back at the junction with Spray Falls.  Speaking of which we made the worthwhile side trip out to the falls on our way back and it was really flowing this morning.   We also stopped at Eagle Cliff viewpoint another worthwhile stopping point on the trail (see the photo) and talked to a couple who were lugging their skis up to Spray Park to go glacier skiing.  Heading back to Mowich Lake we encountered a steady stream of hikers ultimately seeing 65 people total.  About 12-15 were Wonderland Trail hikers, 6 were skiers (3 pairs), 1 trail runner doing the loop down to Carbon River and up Ipsut Pass and the rest were day hikers.   We were back at the very full parking lot by 9:30.     

There were so many cars coming up the road to the parking lot that once we cleared it we counted those as well and we saw 41 in total between 9:30 and 10:10 when we were back down on Highway 165.

Temps were not too bad with how early we were on the trail.  And a big plus was most of the hike for us was in the shade this morning.   I'd hate to be out in those open meadows this afternoon with all the heat we are getting today and tomorrow.      Like every other hike this summer the bugs were terrible.   Jeno commented "don't they sleep" as they were all over us the moment we stepped out of the car at 5:00 AM.  Needless to say we had multiple applications of bug spray this morning.

Stay safe everyone.  See you on the trail!

SR

Addendum: I added a video of Yogi.