We slept until about 8. We could hear our tent neighbors getting ready for their next hike or destination. When we finally got out of the tent we could see a lot of the vacant tent spots. The people who arrived late last night started taking those spots as we slowly took our camp apart.
To maximize our time, I took the tent apart while Ben made breakfast. We took a few trips to the Escape to get our food and cooking supplies, we figured it was just easier to store them in the vehicle instead of trying to share the food storage bin with 25 other campers. I got the sleeping bags and sleeping pads all rolled up by the time our oatmeal and eggs were done. Ben had burned himself on the hot metal container which ultimately burned the bottom of the oatmeal. We thought with the addition of the brown sugar and the raisins it might mask the burn taste...it didn't. We ate as much as we could before we had to dump it. We cleaned out our dishes and began making the eggs. The eggs turned out well. We cleaned up and I took the fly and tent down. He helped me attach the restraints on each of the pieces. We made three trips to the Escape and I tetris'd everything to make it fit nice inside. We made sandwiches, filled up our water, grabbed the cameras and made sure we had everything for our last hike of the weekend.
Spray Park Trail, is a 6 mile round-trip hike through a blended transition of forest, meadows and dry waterfall beds. Because of our seasonally dry weather, those dry river and waterfall beds should have had water flowing through them. We entered on the southeast side of the Mowich campgrounds and immediately walked down a steep series of steps and then took a left off the Wonderland Trail to the trail we were going to spend some time on.
We finally reached the top and about a quarter of a mile we reached Eagle Cliff Viewpoint. Mount Rainier was IN YOUR FACE! The view was amazing from here.
We spent about 15 minutes at this spot along with some other people roughly around our age. We had a couple moments of small talk and then we were on our way. Ben said it was a little over a quarter of a mile to go until the waterfall. I was excited and sweaty. We passed the Eagles Roost campsite and off to the Spray Falls spur. We walked along this very craggy, rooty, uneven pathway to the falls. We rounded the corner and there it was!
We hiked up the side of it to find a nice place to sit and eat our lunch. The sandwiches, chips and fruit chewies hit the spot. We admired the falls as we ate. Then we did some exploring. We hiked all the way up to the falls to take some video and some more pictures. We got soaked but it felt good after being in the high 80's that afternoon. After we got our shots we headed back down towards the trail to head back. We were getting tired.
As soon as we entered the trail for the return trip, all we did was hike and stop a few times for water, we basically busted this thing out. We ended up passing three groups of people on our hike back to Mowich. When we got to the final quarter mile our feet felt like bricks and we just wanted to be done and there was one last hill with stairs to conquer. We walked up them together like a boss. We dropped our stuff off at the Escape and grabbed some towels, we were going to go soak in the lake for a bit.
We found a place and set our stuff next to a big rock. There was a family sitting there by the large rock on a bench. Ben and I had already gotten in the water. The grandma took a 2 year old girl near our stuff, helped her pull down her pants and had her pee right there! I was appalled! Ben said if they peed on your stuff I am yelling at them. We got to shore and I went over and grabbed our stuff before they crapped on it. No pee thank goodness. I really didn't want to have to yell at this family for being savages.
We dried off and walked back up the trail to the car. We threw the towels in the car and got the GPS out and the Nuvi and plugged in the coords to On the Way to Mowich #2 (GC5F24M). The GPS ran out of batteries so I guessed where the cache was and I was right. It was hidden inside the crotch of two trees just off the dirt road. Ben joined me in signing it, took a picture and then put it back and ran back to the car before we got dusted.
Not even a half mile down the road was another, the ones we really came up here for besides the camping and hiking, Rainier100: Road to Mowich Lake (GC5WAEK). I changed the batteries in the GPS and handed it to Ben to lead us to the cache. Because of the trees we walked past it twice. It was hidden inside of a rotted log. Some muggles had pulled over while we signed the log. We put it back and jumped back inside the Escape for the next one.
We drove all the way back down the long dirt road. There were several cars, trucks and SUV's behind us. I was glad we were in the lead only because we didn't have dust kicking up in front of us the entire way. We got to the pavement and back onto Hwy 165 towards Carbonado, a small historic mining town. There was one at the intersection inside the Welcome to Carbonado (GC5J9N7) sign. Ben stayed in the car while I hopped out to grab it.
The next town, Wilkenson, had our last cache of the day and one of the important ones, Rainier100: Wilkenson Coke Ovens (GC5WADF). Bob and I had been here years ago collecting all the caches in the area, which there weren't that many to begin with in these smaller communities. I gave Ben the GPS and had him lead the way. We should have read the clue because we had to walk more than we needed to. We also found out there was a trail behind the sticker bushes. Our feet were tired so we really didn't want to walk up the hill but we did anyway. We reached the cache, signed our names and hurried back down to the Escape so we could just be done with the day. Our next stop was his mom's house just down the road.
We unloaded our really gross hiking clothes to wash, some of our bags and our shower stuff. His mom made us hamburgers, we got showered and went to the store for some ice cream and a movie. We relaxed, ate ice cream and watched the newest X-Men movie. Then passed out hard.
Next Adventure: Lake Lawrence and T5 Cache
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