August 26, 2014
Hallelujah! Day 4 had finally arrived. My love of food is strong. Even in the early stages of planning our trip I knew I was going to make it a point to visit Sunrise Visitor Center. I was sure a burger after three days on the trail would taste like unicorns and rainbows. Also, bonus because it was going to be a short day (12.7 miles) so we could take our sweet time.
I remember the hike from Granite Creek to the Skyscraper Mountain area very well. Can you just imagine being all hot and sweaty in your four day old sweaty and sticky clothes, knowing that the promise of a burger and facilities to wash your clothes are just a few miles away on your "easy day"?
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| I especially enjoyed hiking through the moraines. Very cool landscape. |
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| Glacier |
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| Typical stroll through the forest then... |
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| Bam! Rainier! |
After wiping the stinging sweat from my eyes the views continued. Our cameras can not do this place justice.
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| View before heading down the last leg towards Sunrise |
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| Going down |
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| No shade to be found. |
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| Water! Good place to wet a piece of cloth to drape around your neck to keep cool. |
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| A sunbathing marmot ~ 50 yards off the trail. |
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| Signage to Sunrise |
At this point we began to see hoards of day hikers. I think they were confused as to why Andy and I were fully clothed. Oh, what I would have given up to be in shorts and a tank. A burger? Nah!
The last mile stretch on the wide gravel road to the visitor center felt like an eternity. We didn't take any pictures other than the one below. The lady taking our order wasn't friendly, but gave us a smile when we were in line a second time to order more food. What did we order? One burger + bag of chips, one beef hot dog + bag of chips, one giant cookie, one soda, and one soft serve ice cream EACH. Hahaha. Are you proud or disgusted? I ate it all and was very satisfied. Andy and I decided we'd both order a burger to-go since 1.) it was delicious and 2.) we had (barely) enough room to fit it in our bear kegs with the bags of chips, of course.
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| Hot and fresh lunch on Day 4 @ Sunrise Visitor Center |
Next item of the day was to take care of was laundry. After checking out the public restrooms we decided the regular size sinks were not adequate to wash our clothes. Also, it was busy in there and I suspected we would have received dirty looks from taking up one of the two sinks. Andy asked one of the park museum rangers and she informed us that White River had large size sinks where we could wash up. Sweeeeeet. We fast-hiked down to White River Campground to allow ourselves plenty of time to wash our clothes.
White River Campground is a large car camping campground with a small area in the corner for ~6 tents for hikers. I imagine some hikers would not like this, but I enjoyed the change of pace and seeing other people around. There were no other hikers camping around us so we got the area all to ourselves.
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| We camped just behind (to the right of) this theater area and look! A deer! |
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| And a brave birdie. |
The facilities were across the theater and included men and women's restrooms, an outdoor water faucet to fill buckets of water (also where we washed our clothes), and a dish washing area. The dish washing "sink" looked like a big toilet and flushed like one, too. Andy and I washed all our clothes and hung them on the benches pictured above. We had a bit of sunlight left, but our clothes didn't dry in time. We hung a rope in our campsite to hang our clothes at the end of the day, had dinner, and went to sleep.
The next morning we hung the remaining damp clothes on the back of our packs so they could air dry during Day 5. Putting wet clothes on in the morning is such a gross feeling.
Total miles: 12.7 miles
Total time on trail (including breaks): 7.66 hours
