Catching up on the old blog!

Here are some photos from our fourth of July. We went with some friends to the parade in Liberty Lake. Not sure what I was expecting, but I can tell you, I was not expecting golf carts. The parade was about 25 minutes, all golf carts, and the kids collected so much candy! And that was that!

On the morning of our last day, after we had packed up our car, we drove to the Grove of the Patriarchs and hiked the one mile loop through the old growth forest. It was pretty cool! A good chunk of the hike is boardwalk (love) and we had to cross a suspension bridge, which is always fun. This was a lovely way to close out a very fun trip. I'm dying to get some more National Park camping trip on our calendar. I'm coming for you Zion, Glacier, Olympic, Yellowstone, Arches...

We drove upwards to Paradise, which had a gorgeous visitor's center and all sorts of tourists. We checked in with a ranger to ask about the hike I wanted to do and away we went. There was a lot of snow on the mountain still and lots of wild flowers popping up. It was a stunning hike all the way and all the way down. This one was about 2.5 miles, with a 900' elevation gain. We hiked to the Glacier Vista and back down and made it a loop. It's the hiking that made this trip so worthwhile. Holly and Greta did so great doing 2 good sized hikes in one day.

Our first hike on our full day at Mount Rainier, was one we could get to without driving. We just had to fork right on the Nature Walk. It was a 2.7 mile loop, 300' elevation gain, with a beautiful waterfall. The girls worked on their Junior Ranger badges while we hiked. The forest was so lush and gorgeous. It was kind of magical. We originally planned to hike to the Grove of the Patriarchs as well, but decided to wait to do that one because I wanted to head up further into the park and onto Mount Rainier. So when we finished our hike, we went back to the campsite for lunch.

Our campsite was less than 5 minutes of a walk to the visitor's center and right behind the visitor's center was a little 0.4mile nature trail that walked us past a little stream and a natural hot springs. There were lots of labels for the plants so we were able to learn about some of those. It was so pretty. We did this on our first evening and it was just right.