Mom and I had a much more day with our mountains. We started off leaving the house at 4:45am to see the sunrise on Mount Rainier at Reflection Lake. The drive was a little scary because it was dark and windy but I did good and we’re still alive. It was much easier when the sun came up. We stopped and saw some beautiful angles of Mount Rainier, a different viewpoints, and the other surrounding mountains that complement it.

If you haven’t been to Reflection Lake before, it’s definitely worth a visit. From our hotel in Ashford, it took us 1.5-2 hours to get to there. When you enter the national park before 5 AM, you don’t have to pay anything. Mom has her lifetime passport in the national parks, which would have saved us $30, but no rangers were at the entrance and it’s open 24/7.

After leaving Mount Rainier, we went back to eat breakfast and check out of the hotel. Then we hit the road again for a 2-our drive to Mount Saint Helens. Our plan was to visit the Johnston Ridge Observatory, but we learned this morning that rockslides closed the road in May 2023 and it was still inaccessible. There were a couple of viewpoints we wanted to visit, which still gave us a really good view of the mountain: Mt St Helens Forrest Learning Center, Elk Rock, Castle Lake and Coldwater Lake. As we were approaching our final viewpoint, we noticed that a gift shop was open on a road that we thought was closed. We took a chance and were really happy to find a learning center and not just a gift shop with beautiful views. We watched a movie about the eruption in 1980. Seeing the before, and after photos of the mountain is really amazing. The debris avalanche on the northwest side was unbelievable. To see rock, ice, ash and mud turn into flowing water was horrifying. There were not that many people that died, which is actually surprising ass it demolished everything in its path.

Our last mountain viewing of the day was Mount Hood. We left Mount St Helens and drove for about two hours on WA 504 and I-5 south to Camas, Washington. We’re spending the night in an Airbnb in the small town not far from Vancouver and Portland. We could see the Columbia river on the right side of the I5, and many people are out and about enjoying boating on the water. Then this majestic mountain to the left surfaced took my breath away. We’re looking forward tomorrow to driving the Washington side of the Columbia River and then over to the Oregon side while getting a closer look at Mount Hood.