Saturday morning dawned foggy but the forecast didn’t call for anything too dire, so we decided to take our chances and hike high in the morning. We’d been transfixed by the Tatoosh Range from Paradise while hiking there on Friday, so decided our morning destination would be the Pinnacle Plummer Trail, 3 miles round trip to the saddle with about 1150 feet gain. We also explored around and did some scrambling once up there, so who knows what the totals were.
Small falls on the way up.
We passed a WTA crew hauling up gravel from a truck at the trailhead and promised to bring some stones down with us, if we found any.
The clouds gave the day a very different feeling than the day before.
Rescue copter heading up to the mountain. I never heard the full story on this, but a few hours later we saw them coming out with the rescue basket dangling.
Exploring the saddle
Word is, on a clear day this valley points you straight down to Adams. Even without, it was lovely.
This marmot was very suspicious of us.
I got about halfway up this scramble to the top before I remembered that I am a sniveling coward.
I pretended to take flower pictures on the way down so I could recover my breath. Luckily it was not hard to pretend.
Heading back down from the saddle, Rainier is still hiding in the clouds, making me glad we’d visited Paradise on such a stunning blue sky day
These trees really caught my eye, especially with tiny hikers for scale
Back on the lower trail, we gave the trail crew our promised rocks, admired the flowers, and had lunch at Reflection Lake, where we debated where we should explore for the afternoon…
