Burroughs Mountain Trail: Sunrise Hike at Mt. Rainier

Autumn tends to arrive for me as a feeling before the calendar catches up. This year it came on a dark drive with three detours, a sky just beginning to color, and a question I’d been carrying about my own kids and what they’ll remember when they look back. Not the gifts, I suspected. Something smaller, and more often. I took that question up the Burroughs Mountain Trail at Mount Rainier, climbing from Sunrise toward the mountain, and early on a curious deer stepped out to look me over.

Burroughs Mountain Trail

The drive in was pure September. Something about this season still feels like the night before the first day of school, and even in the dark, with the roads winding and the route changing on me, I could feel it settling in: cooler mornings, slower evenings, the people who fill a house when the weather turns. It’s my favorite time of year, and the drive gave me room to wonder why.

Higher up, the question about childhood kept coming back. My kids are making their own way now, and somewhere between the lakes and the tundra I was thinking less about them and more about Hot Wheels tracks, forts made out of blankets, and a patch in the woods we called Tonka Land.

The Journey…

The trail eased me in gently, which I appreciated at a brisk 38 degrees, the kind of air that wakes you up on the first breath, with the sun still just below the horizon. Before long, a curious deer stepped out and stood watching me with the same inquisitive look our whippet, Leo, gives me when he can’t figure out what I’m doing. It held still long enough that I wondered whether it was inviting me to pause or simply wondering what the heck I was up to. A little farther on, an impressive elk stood against the morning light. It eventually stepped behind a tree and kept looking at me around the trunk, as if to say, you can’t see me, I’m behind a tree. Up ahead, the silhouette of Mount Rainier was starting to come into view.

About a mile and a half in, I reached Shadow Lake and stopped. The lake had shrunk to a smaller version of itself, with autumn color along its edges and the early light lying across the water, brightening the trees and the ridges around it. A fellow hiker had shared photos just days earlier of a black bear and her cub playing in that water, and I couldn’t help picturing them there. I stood on the small bridge by the lake, which stayed dry today, one more sign of how far the season had turned. I took a deep breath and let the stillness settle before moving on.

Past the lake, the trail toward First Burroughs rose gently at first, then settled into a steady climb that asked a little more of me. Along a ledge, the Emmons Moraine opened up below me, with the pale green water I’d hiked to last week, seen now from much higher up. Climbing toward Second Burroughs, the forest gave way to high tundra, and the glaciers spread out wide and shining in the sun. I stopped to take it in and felt a weight lift from my shoulders, though it may have just moved to my legs. Small birds fluttered around me across the tundra, and the air had the bite of the first breath of winter. I reached Second Burroughs and kept going.

At Third Burroughs the wind whipped around me, and clouds were starting to wrap the summit of Mount Rainier. I met a couple from Missouri up there, and we traded stories long enough that we didn’t feel like strangers by the end. On the way back, through a series of ascents and descents, a curious fox followed me for a stretch, pausing now and then in the tall grass, maybe hunting for lunch. We stopped a few times to look at each other, and it was a good way to finish the hike. The day wasn’t quite done, though. Driving down from the summit, I was flagged down by a group of older travelers from Texas whose rental car had run into trouble, and I stopped to help them sort it out.

Gratitude…

I drove in the dark this morning, and it took three detours to get me to the trailhead, which isn’t how I’d planned to start the day. The roads were quiet anyway, and the stillness turned out to be good company. With the equinox just behind us, I could feel the season shifting, and it brought back something I’ve felt every September since I was a kid, that back-to-school feeling. Crisp air, early mornings, a return to routine. It’s muscle memory by now, and I don’t think I ever outgrew it. Every drive to a new trailhead carries a little of it, the sense of heading toward something that hasn’t started yet, and this morning the whole world seemed to be holding still, waiting for the sun to color the sky.

In the dark I couldn’t see much of the color yet, but I knew it was coming, the reds, oranges, and yellows that show up every year right on time. The air had turned crisp, and the recent rain had finally given my parched lawn some relief. The trees along the road were starting their change, and I found myself looking forward to the small comforts that come with it: evening fires, warm meals, cooler nights. Every autumn I’m reminded that change can be the best part of a thing, not the end of it.

This season carries the holidays with it too, Halloween, Thanksgiving, then Christmas, each with its own kind of warmth. It also reminds me of Kelly’s autumn outfits, which always looked like they’d come straight from the wardrobe department of a Hallmark movie. On those unfamiliar roads this morning, my mind kept drifting to shared meals and gatherings, laughter with the people I love, and a warm beverage held in both hands, more hand warmer than refreshment. What I’m grateful for is that autumn comes back every year and asks me, every time, to slow down and notice the people who make it feel like home.

Reflections…

My trail-thought this morning was a question: what actually defines a childhood? Is it the things we thought mattered most at the time, or something deeper that lasts? I’ve been watching my own kids move into adult life. My sons are finding their footing, building toward the futures they want. My daughter is new to motherhood, raising her 19-month-old son. Watching them, it seems clear that shared experiences, and the connections that grow out of them, outlast anything we ever bought. The rituals and traditions we built as a family became a kind of foundation under them. And when I look back at my own childhood, the memories that stayed are the ones built on love and time together, worn in like a familiar trail.

I remember the Hot Wheels track my brother and I spent entire weekends perfecting, determined to build the ultimate gravity-powered run. The cars were only part of it. What I remember is the back-and-forth while we designed it, the teamwork when something didn’t work, and how the hours slipped by without either of us noticing. I can still picture the forts we built from propped-up sheets and blankets, and the dominoes we spent a whole day setting up, one by one, for a few seconds of watching them fall. Every one of those projects came down to a single shared moment of triumph, and it took both of us to get there. The toys were never what mattered. What mattered was what they got us doing, together.

Deep in the woods was Tonka Land, where all the neighborhood trucks lived their secret lives. We spent whole days moving dirt, sunrise to sunset, building elaborate job sites and leaving our yellow fleet behind like an abandoned excavation when we went home. It isn’t the trucks I remember. It’s the community we built out there, the imaginary worlds, and the trust our parents gave us to come home at dusk, dirty and happy and full of stories. Some of the steadiest markers of my childhood were even simpler. Every Thursday, when Dad had the early shift, he grilled hamburgers, and I stood next to him in the heat of the grill, learning how to time the flip. In those moments I felt something like legacy, and a lot like love.

In summer, I rode my bike from Phinney Ridge down Market Street, through Ballard and Interbay, to Mom’s office across from the Seattle ferries. It felt like a secret world: a freight elevator, a Coke machine that sold bottles, and the Maritime Diner, tucked behind a narrow entrance, with burgers seasoned by years on the same griddle. Other days my brother and I carried our two-person raft on our heads from Phinney Ridge through Upper and Lower Woodland, over Aurora on the footbridges, all the way to Green Lake, where we drifted while joggers and bikers circled the three-mile path. I keep the photos now, the journals, the family artifacts, the kids’ artwork, and the keepsakes I saved from Kelly. This journal is my way of adding what they can’t hold: how it felt.

This time of year brings back the traditions Kelly and I carried over from our own childhoods and added to with our own. On Christmas Eve we stayed up late assembling gifts and filling stockings, then set them at the foot of the kids’ beds, which bought us a quiet Christmas morning. While they explored their stockings before coming downstairs, we made breakfast with “December” by George Winston playing, then settled under our sherpa blanket by the fire with warm coffee drinks. When we were ready, we let the kids know they could come down, and they raced to the family room with their eyes lit up and smiles they couldn’t hold back. It was pure joy, and I think it’s one of the chapters of their childhood they’ll keep the longest.

Thanksgiving had its own rhythm: pajamas and the Macy’s parade in the morning, decorating for Christmas the next day on leftover turkey sandwiches, old holiday movies and hot cocoa stirred with candy canes. There were the family road trips too, full of jokes and stories. Out on the trail, all of it came into focus. The best thing I can give my children isn’t wrapped in paper or tied with a bow. It’s love, and the small, steady experiences that don’t depend on money and happen often enough to become ours. Traditions like that belong to them now as much as to me, and they can carry them into their own families and write their own stories from there. The path continues.

-Ken