Adventure and Camping at Mount Rainier in 2021 - Washington

So 2 things on my Bucketlist for this trip were to see a Glacier up close and to see an active volcano, so today we decided to drive from our AirBNB in Renton, Washingon, an hour and a half to see Mt Rainier National Park and mark both of those off the list.
Mt Rainier is an active volcano. Now, it last erupted over a century ago, but active is active, and sometimes you just don’t know until you know. So you always want to check first before heading out. You know…make sure you don’t get stuck in some magma. But surrounding the enormous peak, are 5 developed areas of the park. They are magnificent. In the summer, think blankets of wildflowers. So, we came in on the North side
Here is where things got a little tricky. When you come into national parks, usually you will lose service on your cell phone. If not, right when you come into the park, probably a little ways out. These are pretty remote areas, so we have learned to rely pretty heavily on the paper map that they give you when you go into your first visitor center or go into the main part of the park. Now this is a little different because we came in from the north and we had been driving, probably 15-20 before we realized that our phone wasn’t routing. We weren’t exactly sure where we were. We could see signs and it told us which way to go, but we weren’t exactly sure the best way to get where we wanted to go, where we wanted to go, what that was, what that meant…so we just kind of winged it for a bit.
It turns out, we ended up driving all the way down, parallel to the mountain to Stevens Canyon entrance. If you look at a map, that’s the bottom part of Mount Rainier National Park. But that was cool because a lot of the stuff we wanted to see was down there anyways.