Thru Hiking the Wonderland Trail: Prep & Plan

Exploring Mount Rainier National Park

Greetings everyone,

I’m about to start a series of posts about the Wonderland Trail. After writing out my thoughts, I quickly realized that it’d be wise to break this up into several posts. Stay tuned for each episode. Thanks for your time and I hope you enjoy it.

Christopher

Golden Ticket

Back in January Susan and I both submitted to the National Park Service Lottery for a permit to circumnavigate Mount Rainier via the Wonderland Trail. The trail is considered a gem of the PNW being a historic route constructed in 1915.  13,000 people submitted for one of the 1,800 parties that would get to guarantee an itinerary around the National Park. It was estimated in 2002 that only 250 people complete the thru-hike each year, meaning in one solid session.  February came around and we received an email from the National Park Service saying that Susan had won a permit.  In mid March we would need to log into the NPS website on a designated day at a specific hour to declare our itinerary.  It was recommended that we have three different plans ready in case previous reservations didn’t allow for our ideal agenda.

After studying the Mountaineer’s book Hiking the Wonderland Trail for several weeks we came up with a general concept for our trip.  We had decided on 9 days and going clockwise around the mountain with several camps being prioritized.  As we logged into the reservation page we found that our ideal plan worked as long as we took a chance by adding an extra day at Snow Lake, which is a camp near the front country portion of the park, but a mile off the Wonderland Trail.  We had also chosen a period in August that allowed the trail building crews to repair the trail after a long winter season and hopefully dodge the smoke of wildfires.  Spoiler alert, Snow Lake was one of our favorite camps and also allowed for us to hike the premier Skyline Trail. Also, the trail conditions were phenomenal and we had only four hours of smoke on the last day as we returned to the car.

Snow Lake with Unicorn Peak

View from Skyline Trail

Preparing

Months rolled by as we had our normal season of teaching and summer activities.  I had enrolled myself in two sprint triathlons which required a large amount of training, which I figured would complement the conditioning for such a large endurance endeavor.  As my racing season came to a close, it brought my focus to hiking and food prep.  In short, we hiked 100 miles in training, mostly including weight.  Most of our day hikes I used 20% of my body weight for impact and stamina endurance.  We did the Timberline Trail around Mt. Hood in three days, which was nearly half of the distance and elevation gain of the Wonderland in a third of the time.

The next portion was preparing nutrition.  We decided to take the risk of preparing our own food for several meals rather than strictly purchasing commercially available freeze dried meals.  That said, we tried Outdoor Herbivore for two meals and they were some of the best I’ve had. With the use of a food dehydrator we tried six different recipes, 4 of which were very good.  All edible, some less desirable than others.  Long grain brown rice and tofu is a problem I’ll need to navigate for future trips.  We also decided to go vegan for the journey based upon the black bear population and a documentary about vegan athletic performance called The Game Changers.  We were successful enough that we’ll continue to develop this method of home cooking our meals for these trips.  Better and cleaner nutrition for cheaper.

One of the other experiments on this trip was supplementation. I would bring a green powdered multivitamin, chia seeds to mix with my electrolytes, pre workout instead of coffee, my meal replacement powder, and a turmeric lemon blackpepper recovery mix. I was estimating about 3000 calories per day and the goal was to loose as little weight as possible. Probars, dehydrated fruit, and trail mix would be on my hip at all times. I consumed nearly everything I could fit into our cache buckets, so mission accomplished.

Speaking of cache buckets, one of the blessings that the Wonderland Trail offers is that you may cache food at a few ranger stations around the mountain.  Thankfully you can mail a 5 gallon bucket via USPS with food for under $20.  This allowed us to carry food in 3 periods, 5 days, 3 days, and 2 days.  Since you cannot mail isobutane, we were concerned with how we would carry 10 days worth of fuel.  Our permits were at the Longmire Ranger Station, which thankfully allowed us to cache fuel as well and split the fuel consumption into two periods of five days.

There were several new pieces of equipment that we decided to incorporate into our kit. The Garmin inReach Messenger was a replacement for an old PLB that needed to be retired.  Also a simpler stove that is lighter than my 4 season stove along with snap-bowls to replace my heavy kitchen set. Finally, I decided on upgrading to an iPhone 13 mini for photography. It really did a great job. None of the photos I’ll share in this post are altered whatsoever.

The Plan

The schedule looked like the following:

Day 0 From the car > Sunrise | 1.6 miles

Day 1 Summerland | 10.6 miles

Day 2 Indian Bar | 5.1 miles

Day 3 Maple Creek | 10.2 miles

Day 4 Snow Lake | 4.9 miles

Day 5 Pyramid Creek | 12 miles

Day 6 South Puyallup River Camp | 9.6 miles

Day 7 Golden Lakes | 12.2 miles

Day 8 Eagle’s Roost | 13 miles

Day 9 Mystic Camp | 12.7 miles

Day 10 Sunrise | 8.9 miles

We elected to day hike 2 of those days which bumped up the mileage and elevation of the entire trip to 112 miles and 31,000’ of elevation change, averaging out to 12 mile and 3000’ per day.  Summerland and Indian Bar are two of the most desirable camps on the trip and we were fortunate enough to land both in our reservation.  This implied a fairly easy start to the trip, which correlated to the heavier packs for the first five days to the first cache in Longmire.  As we pass through the south side of the mountain the elevation and distances would become more demanding as we access more remote portions of the park.

Overview of our itinerary