Exploring the Sunrise Area of Mt. Rainier
We’ve seen some pretty big mountains in our lifetimes. But anyone who has gotten a closer look at Mt. Rainier knows that it’s on its own level of grandiosity. The first time that we saw it—we were honestly intimated by it. We’ve hiked our share of 14ers, but to look at Mt. Rainier—it’s a different experience. Working in the PNW is always a dream for us, as we feel most at home in these landscapes. So working with these two on their elopement day was incredible—for a lot of reasons.
Carmen and Phil came all the way from Michigan to elope in Mt. Rainier before continuing on a West Coast road trip to celebrate. These two handled this hike with ease and we managed to get up to the lookout with plenty of gorgeous light.
This is a popular hike—and it’s easy to see why. Which is why we often recommend shooting at sunrise to keep your elopement day more intimate. It’s a different level of excitement than sunset—and even though Jaclyn isn’t a morning person—she’s a morning person for all of our elopement sunrises!
The cascading shadows of mountains in the distance are something that we’ve really only seen in Washington (which is why we live here now!). The sheer amount of light and shadow across the landscape is unreal. Even after sunrise, the beauty lingers for quite a while. We were incredibly grateful to get such a clear day in Mt. Rainier. Being on that ridge at night surrounded by fog, to seeing it bright and early in a totally different light—just goes to show the dramatically changing nature of these landscapes.
This hike was such a dream for an elopement. Some hikes only have epic views above the tree line, or after a substantial hike—but this hike had great views for the majority (if not the entire) hike. We loved getting to turn out at every turn to get a different vantage point of the Park.
