Length: 5.6 miles
Elevation Gain: 800 feet

My little brother came to visit this past weekend, and to best show him my favorite local Super Dangerous Volcano That Will One Day Awaken & Kill Us All, we decided to hike to the Fremont Lookout in Mount Rainier National Park. My friend Nicole came with us, and we all got the hell out of Seattle bright and early Sunday morning.

The Fremont Lookout is the highest lookout in the park at 7,000 feet. But because you begin the hike at the Sunrise Visitor Center, which is already pretty high up, the elevation gain is easy to handle. In fact, the beginning climb from the parking lot to the trail junction was the most difficult part, and even that was most likely because we went straight from a two-hour car ride to legging it. Even my brother, who has never hiked before, successfully completed this without issue in his running shoes.

The drive to the trail is easy — just put “Sunrise Visitor Center” into your GPS and enjoy paved roads the entire way. The lot is huge, and we had no problem with finding a spot when we got there at 11am. But just as you’d expect from one of the most popular areas of the park, it was crowded, so don’t expect to have much alone time until you’re actually further out on the Fremont Lookout trail.

One of my favorite things about this hike was how many different landscapes we passed en route to the lookout. We went from sandy shrubbed areas, to sudden meadows that were so lush I half expected to see Sister Maria come spinning through (before being evicted for trampling the delicate meadow restoration endeavor), to barren rockscapes where every step sounded like you were crushing the stone skeletons of those vanquished in the Great Pottery War.

The last mile is by far the “trickiest” in that the trail becomes narrower and rockier, with one side dropping off pretty steeply. I have a bigger fear of heights than your average human, but I was able to deal with this part just fine by going slowly and leaning away from the cliff side. It helps that the trail is still plenty wide even at its narrowest, so my knees never went wobbly from vertigo like they did when I was hiking Harry’s Ridge last year.

It took us a little over an hour to get to the lookout, and that’s with me stopping to take photographs of every interesting cloud and flower along the way, and also a good 10-minute stop to look at a herd of mountain goats in the valley below. You can see Rainier the entire time. In fact, Rainier is so close that all three of us declared that we could probably easily summit it, you know, if we weren’t already so busy.

The lookout was closed when we went, but we did climb up to the platform to take in the amazing, sweeping views. If you want dramatic, stunning panoramic shots, you can get plenty on this hike. The best view of Rainier is definitely when you get to the lookout, though.

It was incredibly windy that day, so we chose to rest for our victory sandwiches on the rocks at the base of the lookout instead, where we were instantly mobbed by some very tenacious chipmunks. One even tried to grab my phone, perhaps because it needed to make a phone call. Silly chipmunk. There’s no cell service out here.

From car back to car, this hike took us 4 hours to complete, and that is with a very long rest at the lookout. Also, because this is inside Mount Rainier National Park, you’ll have to pay $25 for a day pass (which is good for a week) as you enter into the park. I’m pretty sure there is an annual pass option too if you plan to visit often.