Day Hike - Grand Park (Mount Rainier)

We took a group of conditioning hiking students up to  Grand Park and had a unbelievable adventure.

On the way up we saw three different brown colored black bears. Two at the first meadow you come to and then one more as we sat down for lunch at the nole area of Grand Park. I have never seen 3 bears in one outing before. And the students got to practice what they learned about how to act when they see a bear.

As we were eating lunch we saw some really dark clouds moving our way. So we packed up and headed back down the trail, We went maybe 300 yards when it started to hail so we headed for the trees. We sat under the trees for 5 minutes until it stopped they continued on our way, got maybe another 200 yards and the sky opened up it's dark belly and let us have it. It started to rain large hail at us then it started to lightning and thunder , we took cover in the trees again for about 30 minutes.

As we were huddled under the trees, 3 other hikers came by us and jumped into the trees across from us. They had on shorts and tanks and were covering their heads with emergency blankets. I went over to talked to them to see if they were alright and found out they were cold and wet with nothing more to put on and the temp's was dropping. So I invited them over to where we were and our fantastic group of students helped them out with all their extra rain gear, hats, gloves , pants and shirts. We got them dressed and warmed up and we started back down the trail in the pouring rain, thunder and lightning. The creeks on the way down had now turned into small rivers, there was 2 inches of snow/hail on the ground and all of the areas that were just muddy coming up were now swamp areas. But talking to everyone back at the cars, they all said that they could not of asked for a better hiking learning experience. They got to see why we do what we do.