I'm post-dating this - we went hiking last weekend before I left for a work trip to San Diego. About noon on Saturday we decided it was too nice out to stay indoors, so we shoved a few things into a backpack and headed up to Rainier. It was cloudier (and rainier) up the mountain, but we still did a short 3 mile hike to a couple of waterfalls then headed further up the mountain in the car to view another waterfall. By the time we headed home it was definitely raining instead of 'spritzing' (Steve's word).
To get to the trail we had to cross a loud, rushing glacier fed stream (thus the milky color). There's no way we could have crossed this safely without the bridge. Thankfully, the bridge was very sturdy, but you could see the previous two bridges a bit further downstream, where they'd been washed in past flooding. The trail we hiked was a short section of the Wonderland trail, which is a huge loop circling the base of Mt. Rainier.
The trail to the waterfall looked flat on the map, but in reality it was a pretty steep uphill hike for almost all of it. This is the second of the two waterfalls on the trail:
This is the waterfall we took the car to see. It's only a short distance from the main road, and quite pretty. By this point it was raining pretty steadily so we didn't linger.
