Rainier adventure - or an odd case of serendipity

I’ve referenced this story on ye olde Instagram, but I’ve never told the full story of my mom’s birthday weekend, involving the best dispersed camping spot I’ve ever found and a surprise photography lesson from Art Wolfe. So buckle up :)

Back in our unseasonably warm October, I asked my mom what she wanted to do for her birthday. And since she’s my mom (it’s no secret where I get my sense of adventure), she wanted to go hiking and camping. We had a rough idea of where we might go, but no set plan. So, like any good adventurers, we loaded up Vandalf the adventure van and figured things would work out. We had no idea how right we were.

We took a leisurely drive down to Mount Rainier National Park, stopping for tacos and eventually hitting the traffic trying to enter the park around 2 pm. I’m not sure why everyone and their uncle was trying to get into the park at 2 pm on a Saturday, but here we all were. After waiting over two hours to get into the park, we finally got to the slightly shorter line for existing pass holders… where we discovered that my Discover Pass had expired the month before. (I thought it was still valid, I swear!) The very kind gate agent waved us through and said “This won’t happen again. Make sure you get a new pass before you visit the park again.” Thank you, random park ranger!

Unsurprisingly, the campgrounds were closed for the season. So we made a half-assed attempt to drive up to the visitor center for sunset, then decided we should probably go find a place to dispersed camp before it got too dark. So back down the mountain we went.

I found a spot on the iOverlander app that looked promising, and figured we’d either camp there or somewhere along the way, if we found a good spot. Along the way, we found a great spot with an absolutely stunning view of the mountain, so I, in a moment of brilliance, decided we should drive the remaining mile up the road to the spot marked on the map in case that was even better. It was not, and it was already taken. So we turned around, praying frantically the spot that we saw hadn’t been taken in the few minutes since we’d driven past.

Fortunately, it was still free, and we parked the van, popped the top, and dragged our kitchen supplies out to make a gourmet camping meal of pasta and veggies.

Now, one of the top rules of dispersed camping is that once someone finds a spot, it’s theirs. You don’t share or intrude. But as we’re getting dinner ready, a car comes and parks right behind Vandalf. A man gets out and says, “You have the best view on this road,” (yes, I’m aware) “so there’s a bunch of us that are going descend on your campsite during golden hour to take some pictures, and then we’ll be out of your hair.”

I glanced over at my mom and she seemed pretty chill about the whole thing (which she usually is), so I decided not to make a fuss. Well, turns out that these photographers were all part of a class taught by Art Wolfe, a prominent landscape photographer and mountaineer, and one of my mom’s idols. So I decided to set up my tripod and listen in to the lesson. If he was going to be in my campsite, I might as well get something out of it!

As soon as golden hour was done, everyone packed up and left us alone. We enjoyed our evening in solitude, staring at the stars, drinking hot chocolate and whiskey, and planning our hike the next day. We figured if the line to get into the park was two hours long again, we’d just do a hike outside of the actual national park, so we had our “primary” and two back up hikes planned out.

The next day, we headed into the park where there was no traffic, bought a new Discover Pass, and headed up to the skyline trail. The fall colors were absolutely stunning, and we had an amazing time.

I’m usually a bit more of a planner. The van makes it so we can camp anywhere, but I do like having some idea of where we’ll end up. But this was a great example of just going with the flow and seeing how things work out - and they worked out perfectly. Free photo lesson, amazing shots of Mount Rainier, and an absolute blast of a weekend with my adventurous mom.

Enjoy the journey. See where it takes you. Just make sure to leave no trace :)