After saying a heavy-hearted goodbye to Vancouver Island , we drove to Seattle for a few days. From there our flight to Iceland would leave - the last stop before heading home after almost eleven months…
Seattle actually goes by the nickname Rainy City. The summer months, however, are almost certainly very sunny. Visitor numbers are concentrated accordingly in exactly those three months. The first shock came during our trip planning: you will not find a room in the city centre for under 200 US dollars a night. And room prices stay high well outside the city too, with accommodation quickly booked out - all the more so if, like us, you are travelling on the Labor Day weekend…
We booked ourselves into an AirBnB north of the centre, strategically within walking distance of Five Guys Burger&Fries (Jan’s criterion) and International House of Pancakes (my criterion). In the end we landed at Five Guys on three evenings, but only once at iHOP, which in my memory was somehow tastier.
Theoretically only 20 minutes away by car, it took us an hour to reach downtown on the ’express’ bus… Because just because it says express on the tin does not mean there is any express inside… The bus stopped every 50 m! There really was a genuine express service as well, though it is not called that.
Finally in the city centre, on that sunny Sunday it was above all one thing: absolutely packed! We took a look at a few sights: the farmers market, a chewing-gum is-that-art-or-can-it-go installation and the Starbucks roastery, built in the style of Charlie’s chocolate factory. We gave a coffee from the world’s first Starbucks a miss, given the length of the queue.
Somehow after that we did not quite know what to do with ourselves in Seattle. Yes, we could certainly have visited plenty more museums. But we had a second ‘mission’: equipping ourselves for our final stop. Since we would mostly be camping in Iceland, where the nights (and the days too) get rather colder, what we needed above all were warm sleeping bags. We had sent our sleeping bags back from Mexico - and genuinely had not needed them for five months in Central and South America. Along with our cooking pot, waterproof trousers, gloves…
The biggest challenge, in fact, was buying gloves. The autumn/winter stock had not yet arrived in the shops. After working through every American shop, my last hope lay with good old H&M. And I was not disappointed!
For the next day we had hired a car to drive into Mount Rainier National Park. Mount Rainier had already beamed impressively at us from a distance when we arrived in Seattle. Even though we initially thought that three days in Seattle was a bit tight for a trip into the national park: it was the best decision we could have made.
We picked the Summerland Trail, since the blog we consulted put it so nicely:
If you can only do one summer full-day hike in Washington, the hike to Summerland in Mt. Rainier National Park is your best bet.
That is obviously no insider tip, which is why the small car park is usually bursting. That our walking day fell exactly on the Labor Day holiday did not necessarily improve matters.
To avoid jeopardising our best bet, we started the engine at 5 in the morning for the two-hour drive to the trailhead. We had grown so used to lovely weather these past weeks that we automatically reached for T-shirt and shorts for this walk. Well, I would have reached for shorts in theory. Mine had somehow gone missing on our last cycle trip. There is always a bit of attrition on a long trip like this.
Arriving at the car park it was rather cold! Then again we were at 1100 m here, with a climb to a good 2000 m ahead of us up to the snow-covered Panhandle Gap. We joked that we were surely completely under-equipped for the walk. Like the people who march down the Grand Canyon in flip-flops.
We quickly threw on a jumper each and set off on the trail. And after about fifteen minutes we very quickly dropped any fear of being too lightly dressed. It was warm! And at 8 in the morning!
The route itself was already indescribably beautiful. And since I cannot describe its beauty, I hope the pictures will do the rest. Mind you, these are all phone pictures, since I would need a laptop to get at my camera shots.
But when the path opened out into a wildflower meadow and revealed the view of the snow-covered Mount Rainier… What can I say. It was one of the most beautiful sights of my life. Above all, with a blue, cloudless sky we had everything we could possibly have wished for.
The actual Summerland Trail ends at this point (well, after you have walked all the way back down), but you can go another 2 km on to the Panhandle Gap, a saddle between two glacial river sources. It is genuinely astonishing how the green meadow landscape changes into barren rock and snowfields within five minutes of walking. When we had mastered the climb up to the Panhandle Gap, we were lost for words all over again. What a view of Mount Rainier from up there!
Verdict: I have never done a walk as beautiful as this one. I do not know on which day of my life I have said “How beautiful is that!” so often.
After a perfect day like that there is one thing you do not want: to go back into a loud and crowded city. On top of that, alarmingly many neglected figures are walking the streets in Seattle…
When we looked out of the window the next morning, the sky lay grey and heavy over the city and a veritable film of ash covered our hire car. New forest fires had broken out and the wind had carried the smoke over Seattle. It really is unbelievable that only a single day earlier we had such perfect conditions for our walk…
We could not muster the energy for more sightseeing in Seattle, but at least for a baseball game of the Seattle Mariners. Insight: the rules of baseball differ from German school rounders. And insight number 2: nice to have been there once. No need to repeat it.
While Seattle itself was no highlight, our trip into Mount Rainier National Park stoked our anticipation even further for our next (and last) destination: Iceland!