The Good News

Your Wenzel Starwood is pitched in Cougar Rock Campground, rain fly tauter than a drum. Breakfast has been cooked, consumed, and cleaned up. Lunches are assembled, packs loaded, water bottles filled. Sunscreen and Deet applied. Now what?

Lace up your boots. Amble across the Longmire-Paradise Road just outside the campground at Mount Rainier National Park, and head upstream to Carter and Madcap Falls. This trail – a central chunk of the Paradise River/Wonderland Trail connecting Longmire and Paradise — is a perfect leg stretcher for a perfect morning. It goes like this:

Cross the road and hit the Wonderland Trail. Cross the ever-changing, chocolate-milk Nisqually River, whose bridges are washed out more often than not. Follow an old service road at a gentle pace, first parallel to and then away from the raucous river. The old road ends at about 0.4 mile, where the usually crystal-clear Paradise River announces itself nosily on the right en route to the Nisqually. From here the path dips into a more standard trail, often following an old wooden water pipe that once fed an electrical generator below. The pace steepens slightly as a sprawling slope of crumbled rock from Eagle Peak parades into view. Just over your shoulder loom the jagged peaks of the Tatoosh Mountains—like the molars, cuspids and fangs of some primordial dinosaur. Here comes Carter Falls.

Named for guide Henry Carter, who built the first trail to the Paradise Valley, Carter Falls is the last of the multitude of waterfalls cascading along the Paradise River. While perhaps the least interesting of the seven named waterfalls here – and countless unnamed others – the sudsing 55 foot falls has certain eye-catching features, namely a natural pour spout which funnels the water into a square groove, creating a symmetrical column of water. A brash gusher, you can hear conifer-obscured Carter Falls before you see it, rushing over the rocks at an elevation of 3,700 feet. Most day hikers turn back here. Pity. Just a quarter mile further canters beautiful Madcap Falls.

Near the confluence of Tatoosh Creek, vociferous Madcap Falls slides down a broad granite step rather than tumbling like a typical falls. The gentle whitewater curtain Madcap kicks up can make you dizzier than the Zip-a-Whirl at the Grays Harbor Fair. Whew! We have lunch on our backs and time on our hands and mosey uphill to a delightful spot in the river just above Madcap Falls. Broad, smooth rocks beg to napped upon and several deep, clear pools beckon summer bathers. We resist. The water looks great, but hypothermia isn’t on today’s agenda.

We keep going, surprising a black-tailed doe and a days-old fawn. She leaps one way; we jump another. Three-quarters of a mile further and we pass a trail crew making repairs from last Fall’s flooding in which the park received almost 18 inches of rainfall in 36 hours. Rivers and streams all over the park overwhelmed their channels. Floods exceeded anything the park has experienced in its 108-year history. The National Park Service estimates that “damage to roads, trails, campgrounds, and buildings will exceed $36 million.”

Recovery efforts are underway, even out here in the boonies. Repairs will take months or years to complete. Stevens Canyon Road, the only road through the park connecting east and west entrances, remains closed due to extensive slide damage and washouts. It’s scheduled to open the day before we depart. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, back on the trail:

Most creek crossings involve fording ice-cold snow melt that’s running like a three-year old at the Kentucky Derby. Close to Paradise River Camp, the only crossing in sight is a newly downed log. The Douglas fir isn’t yet adzed flat. It’s still round, bark intact. One misstep = trouble. Lots of it. So we don’t look down. We scamper across one hiker at a time to avoid inordinate bouncing, loss of balance and kerplunk! Dad goes first. Kids next. Mom last. All secure.

Higher up and further in, we excavate the back packs and dredge up sandwiches, drinks and munchies at Paradise River Camp. "Cheer up, kids! Only four and a half miles back to the campground. The good news: it’s all downhill."

***

Visit my blog at: http://www.homesteadblogger.com/Heavincense

Story ID:	2640
Written by:	Kristine L. (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Only Here
Location:	-- --
Year:	2007