Day Hike Washington: Mount Rainier, 5th Edition: More than 50 Trails around Mount Rainier National Park, Longmire, and Paradise Area

by Ron C. Judd

Overview

Discover the 51 best day-hike trails in and around Washington State's scenic Mount Rainier.

Now fully updated for climate-change impacts to trails and ADA accessibility, the Day Hike series is perfect for national park enthusiasts and people who want to spend their days in the mountains and their nights at home.

Whether you start from the Paradise area or Longmire or Mowich Lake, the 51 incredible hikes in this popular guidebook feature the stately forests, mountain vistas, alpine meadows, and glacial meadows unique to Mount Rainier. Each trail is rated from easy to extreme, giving first-time or veteran hikers the variety they want, as well as topographical maps, trail descriptions, and more.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632175526
Publisher:	Blue Star Press
Publication date:	03/18/2025
Series:	Day Hike!
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Washington-state native RON C. JUDD, a veteran columnist and reporter at the Seattle Times, has spent most of his life exploring the trails, campgrounds, streams, and beaches of the Pacific Northwest. The author of a half dozen bestselling guidebooks, two humor books, and a fan's guide to the Winter Olympics, he lives in Bellingham, Washington.

Read an Excerpt

WHAT'S NEW IN THE 5th EDITION
With the second consecutive update inviting you to the wonders of Rainier in full color, the 5th edition is more user-friendly than ever, with improved layout, graphics, charts, full-color photographs, and wheelchair accessibility information.

Continuing to refine an upgrade made to the 4th edition, we’ve provided information for turning a day visit to hike in the park into a multiday getaway, including insider knowledge about campgrounds and lodging in and around Mount Rainier National Park. 

Whether your stay at Rainier will be a single day or much longer, you’ll appreciate trail triage tips that include extensive “Best” lists and suggestions that point you toward specific trails for specific conditions, experiences, hiking companions, or allotted time. 

Some of the most important changes since the previous edition involve getting into the park itself: As noted in the introduction, Mount Rainier in Spring 2024 announced a new summertime reservation system.

Other upgrades are distinctly aimed at accessibility, with new denotations of trails accessible by mobility devices, further enabling adaptive bikers and other adventurous spirits to get into the woods. While there are no fully accessible (ADA-compliant) trails at Mount Rainier National Park, the park has some trails that, to some extent, are doable by wheelchair. Before you head out, be sure to check with staff at the nearest ranger station or visitor’s center to plan for trail slope, grade, width, surface and condition, along with any barriers like downed trees, foot bridges or stairs making the trail inaccessible for wheelchair users.

While we’re talking about wheels: We’ve also updated the guide to recognize the growing popularity of mountain, electric and gravel biking. Starting with the 4th edition, we noted that roads closed to vehicular traffic have lengthened, by miles, access to some of the park's classic day-hike trailheads. We left most of those trails in the guide, in anticipation of more and more folks flocking to them as a combined bike/hike experience. This was a good call. Since then, the growth of different types of outdoor cycling has turned this development even more into a silver lining: roads converted to bike-to-hike trails have brought more diverse groups of recreational enthusiasts to the park. Cyclists—mountain, electric and gravel types—can ride these wide, graded hike-bike trails within park boundaries as the prelude (and postscript) to a hike or just a ride itself alongside a creek or up to a scenic vista. Just remember that wheeled riding on Mount Rainier National Park's hiking-only trails is not permitted.

Beyond that, some other good news. In this space with the 4th edition, we rejoiced over recovery in the park from devastating flooding in 2003 and 2006, with torrents that took away entire trails and even a popular campground. We’re happy to report that no such devastating weather impacted access to the park in the years leading up to this 5th edition.

One exception is notable: High water in 2021 claimed the bridge leading to the magical old-growth forest in the Grove of the Patriarchs Trail, cutting off access to the highlight portion of that classic Northwest day hike, which, because of funding schedules, may not be fully restored until 2026 or beyond. We’ve left the trail description in this guide with the expectation and hope that it will be repaired, and access restored. (In the short term, we’ve taken this hike out of “best” listings for now in case our hopes are not realized.)

Another exception is worth considering: National Forest Service Road 59 has closed due to numerous large washouts. At press time, this has cut off primary access to the Lake George, Goat Lake and Glacier View hikes (Hikes 8, 9, 10). The Forest Service has promised repairs likely beginning in summer 2025. Check with the Cowlitz Valley Ranger District office before you go.

As always, there’s no guarantee that rapid change won’t occur without warning on Mount Rainier. It is, lest we forget, is a slumbering volcano that could decide on several moments’ notice to simply eliminate itself from the landscape. It will never be stable. But the sort of flooding, mudslides, wildfires, and other predicaments that caused major trail damage, then rebuilding, around the park in past years has been delightfully mostly absent since the previous edition of this guide. The landscape in succeeding years has actually seen some remarkable healing—the sort of slow-creeping regrowth that can only occur in nature with help from the hands of time.

Please note also that Mount Rainier Park has now gone farther out of its way to note that two preferably unrelated activities: flying drones of any kind and partaking in usage of recreational marijuana, are forbidden inside the park.

The meat and potatoes of this or any guide—trails and their current conditions—have been thoroughly rechecked. But with a nod to the climate-related damages noted above, we encourage visitors to check in with the park and various hiking websites for any short-term conditions of concern.

Contact information in the guide has also been verified, with web links and X (Twitter) feeds added where appropriate.

As always, we appreciate your help in keeping the guide current. Feedback to the authors from readers suggests this guide has proven a useful tool to many hikers, whether longtime park users or first-time visitors. For that we are grateful, and please know that your suggestions and updates are always welcome.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for the Day Hike! series:
"[Most guidebooks are by] backpackers who occasionally day hike. But most people are day-hikers, who occasionally backpack. And that's the key difference to this series."
—Ron C. Judd

"The series . . . earns points for rating each individual trip on a five-scale and for providing a comparative overview of all hikes in each book's introductory pages. For those of us who like to cherry-pick trails, ratings simplify our task."
—Seattle Times

"The presentation of basic facts (distance, elevation gain, maps, permits, etc.) is excellent and easy to follow. In addition to helpful topographical maps, the guides feature elevation profiles—an inspired addition!"
—Olympian

From the Publisher