Mount Si

We started our first hike in 2021 with a 10.5 mile, 3,000+ elevation gain, and a Mount Si hike that left us sore, stiff and tired.

We originally planned for an 8 mile trip, but the Mount Si parking lot was completely full. We headed up the road to the Mount Teneriffe trail where there was a much bigger and paved parking lot. We anticipated completing Mount Teneriffe instead, but were able to find a bit longer, but much less traveled route and more scenic route to Mount Si. We started at the Mount Teneriffe trail head and made our way up to the Upper Si - Teneriffe Connector Trail.

We chose Mount Si because the weather forecast called for a sunny day, which meant we could possibly see views of Seattle, Puget Sound, The Olympic Mountain Range, Mount Rainier and the Cascade Mountain Range.

The trail started as a pleasant stroll through the woods before turning in to heart racing steep switchbacks. Looking back at it, we were happy we took this back side way to Mount Si as it was provided us with peak a boo views of Mt. Rainier, Mt. Teneriffe, waterfalls and a handful of babbling brooks to jump over and through.

If you've been following along on our blog, you might be wondering what exactly is our fascination with Mt. Rainier... Well our photos simply do not do it any justice and once you see it from a distance or in person you will understand. First, it is simply gigantic. Two plus hours away from Seattle it looks like it's simply in the next town over. Second, the way the clouds form around/on it (the call it the hat) and the sun hits the highest peaks make for beautiful and often colorful landscape.

As we reached Mount Si the two trails merged and it appeared as though we were suppose to summit the giant rock in front of us. As we started to climb the rock covered in more ice than snow with some careful navigation, Ted stopped and said, I am not sure this is worth it. I agreed and we started our careful decent. Two guys were on their way down with better micro spikes than us and said it was something they probably should not have done and it was really cold and windy on top. Disappointed that we were not able to "complete the hike as intended", we decided to take the Mount Si trail head back down to see what we had missed. We both laughed and said that we have grown a lot over the past few months - as historically our completive must complete attitude would have pushed us to conqueror the task at hand (remember the goat trail....).

Mount Si - click on the image to enlarge

We were thankful that we choose to head down the Mount Si trail as we were greeted with the views we hoped to see! Learning later that summiting Mount Si - the giant rock behind us below was sorta an optional add on. We quickly took some selfie station photos and proceeded down because we could not find Ted's gloves. The only photo that we didn't capture as clearly as we had hoped was Seattle/Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountain Range. Maybe next time on a warm summer day!