Except we wouldn't be on the Mountain. Instead, we'd be hiking in a range immediately south of the Mountain and still in Mount Rainier National Park. It's called the Tatoosh Range and the TL;DR is it's 100% worth visiting.

In spite of a scare when passing through the gate that indicated the Paradise lots were already full (at 7am!), we had no trouble parking at the trailhead. I was surprised because from the car you have a magnificent view of Tahoma across Reflection Lakes. It's the sort of shot you see on postcards. <swoon>

Our route forced us to turn our backs on the Mountain as we climbed the maintained trail heading due south. (Gee, you might think to yourself. Why did he mention it was a maintained trail? He rarely calls out maintenance status...) The hike winds through mature forests, across a couple of avalanche gullies full of pikas and views, and finally to a saddle.

And this is where the maintained trail ends. (Oh. I get it.) Now that we were on the ridge, we could start the main body of the adventure. There are roughly 1 billion (exactly 25) prominent, named peaks in the Tatoosh Range. On this trip we were hoping to visit three of them with a thought to maybe getting a fourth.

Our first was Plummer Peak. Pictures make it look worse than it is. In fact, it's a straightforward walk-up made even easier by a snow field (in July). However, from Plummer we could survey much of the range and pick out our peaks.

The first of those was Denman, just a little west. This had a little more scrambling and routefinding than Plummer, but it was never too spicy. We'd seen no one on Plummer, but we ran into two hikers on Denman. And two juvenile marmots. This place is getting too crowded.

From Denman, we returned to the saddle. We'd thought about climbing Pinnacle Peak, but it was a little more scrambly than we were up for so we skipped it. The Castle wasn't ever on the agenda so we traversed under it. We ran into some interesting characters (Mr. Roosevelt, I presume?), but in general we were alone.

Finding a way over the shoulder of The Castle was confusing, but when we succeeded it made good sense. We'd had to descend to get over the shoulder so a quick climb back to the ridge and WOW!

This might be one of the best ridge walks in the Park. Amazing views both north and south. Easy walking. A beautiful tarn and a (relatively easy) climb up to Foss. Of course, we had to go in reverse now. But first we stopped at a hole in the ice over the tarn. A series of dares found both of us standing in knee-deep ice-cold water. Refreshing.

Yeah, we had to climb back up along that spectacular ridge. We had to go over the shoulder. We had to filter water. However, it was well worth it. We'll be back; probably to go up Pinnacle or maybe on the far western end of the range for Eagle and Chutla peaks.

📍 On the lands of the dxʷsqʷaliʔabš (Nisqually) people.