Rainier National Park, Day 2

 We started the day with breakfast on the porch of Paradise Inn and then a short (but steep) hike to the bottom of Narada Falls:

An auspicious start: Stellar Jays were one of the animals we were hoping to see

Across the bridge: this is the river leading into the falls

The view from the bridge over the falls

Starting out down the very muddy trail

View of the falls from the way down

If you look closely, you can just see a marmot making its way up this slope

Rainbow in the mist from the falls

Much better picture of the marmot

We made it to the bottom

After Narada, we headed back past the inn to the trailhead for Bench Lake. This was the farthest north portion of the park currently open, and the ranger warned us we might still see some snow on the trail (he might have undersold that):

The ranger did also promise the best wildflowers in the park (because of the melting snow) and that was no lie, as the selection and quantity of wildflowers were amazing:

Trillium

Avalanche lily

Bear grass

Another great part of the hike was this uphill section that opened into a valley that looks like it was straight out of The Sound of Music:

It's hard to capture in a picture, but this mountainside was covered in little waterfalls

And the very best thing was turning a corner from the meadow onto this vista, with Bench Lake seen from above (we figured it was not going to get better than this, so decided to skip the last half mile that actually went down to the lake):

Abby's selfie

Looking the other direction

After finishing the Bench Lake hike before 10am, we had pretty much exhausted what could be done in the Paradise section of the park due to the snow conditions. We decided to head back down to Longmire to pick up a few of the shorter hikes we'd missed the previous day. We started with the .7 mile Trail of Shadows:

View of the mountain from the trail

After the first trail, we walked back through the little town of Longmire to see this cool historic bridge the ranger had mentioned:

We still had some time, so we decided to tackle one more very short trail, the 0.5 mile Trail of the Twin Firs:

The trees were tremendous

We finished up about 4pm and decided to have an early dinner back on the porch of the National Park Inn:

Took the picture from the outside of the porch this time

Another view from the porch

We had a leisurely dinner and drove back to Paradise a little after 6, to see the fog rolling in again:

By the time we got to the top, though, there was another break in the fog for one last sunset view from the Inn parking lot: