We left bright and early for the three hour drive. It wasn't until about an hour and a half in I realized I hadn't acquired a timed-entry permit and we were going to just miss the get-in-free window. Dang. We stopped on the side of the road and grabbed a permit for the next window. Phew. Disaster averted. Lesson #1: Remember your permits!

Once we were actually in Mount Rainier National Park we made a quick stop to pick up SCIENCE! supplies from the Cascades Carnivore Project depot... er... filing cabinet outside the maintenance garage. Fully stocked we started down the trail.

Lesson #2: Never trust a trail that starts downhill. Unless you've got a shuttle to get you back to your start, you have to come back up that hill. Boooo! That's never good at the end of the day.

The loop we had chosen runs around Shadow Lake. Along the way, we found two piles of scat. Dung. Deuce. Poop. Ew. But amazingly useful when you're studying Cascade red foxes. To be clear, we don't really "study" the foxes. We collect samples from the field. The real SCIENCE! is done by the folks at the Cascades Carnivore Project. (And yes, I'm on the Board of CCP, but even then I'm not part of the SCIENCE!)

We answered questions from other hikers and I sang the praises of CCP. I think I might have even recruited a few new field crew for next season. They told us there was bear poop by the lake. Cool. Let's go check that out.

HOLY CRAP! THAT'S A HUGE PILE OF CRAP!

I mean... I know bears poop big in the woods (or in this case on the shore of the lake), but dang. That bear must have been huge. And its tracks confirmed that. And next to the tracks were more tracks including fox tracks. Coooooool.

We climbed from the Shadow Lake up to Frozen Lake where the Wonderland meets the Sourdough Ridge trail. This was the section for pika. The satellite imagery sure looked like pika habitat. We could hear pika eeping at us. But between us and the rocks was meadow. The Park is too well traveled to go off trail. So we stayed on the trail, too far to see the pika we'd come to find.

Frozen Lake wasn't so frozen. For the first time in all the years I've been visiting, I've never seen it without snow. Tons of people all around. Since we couldn't find the pika we transitioned to plastic.

The Plastic Free Parks project is a project to track waste in National Parks. Every piece of trash we picked up (because you know I love to pick up trash) was cataloged and submitted. The intent is to help inform public policy. Well, it was. Is there public policy anymore? Public policy that serves the public?

Along the way back we stopped every time we saw movement on the rocks. There were for sure pika, but all we saw were chipmunks. And a coyote down in Huckleberry Basin. Too far away to get a decent picture, but neat. And we saw a pika at last! No picture, but it was there.

So we got out three Ps and did all the SCIENCE! we could. Now Sunrise is closed for the winter. It'll be July before we can return, but we'll definitely be back.

📍On the lands of the spuyaləpabš (Puyallup) people.