Why this ride
A compact double-pass circuit around Mount Rainier. The road: WA-410 and WA-123. Distance and riding time are estimates from the checkpoints until the road is measured on this page.
CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Chinook and Cayuse Pass Loop
Plan this ride
- Recorded distance
- 146 km
- Riding-time estimate
- 2 h 23
- Journey
- Recorded itinerary
Distance and timing basis
The recorded total and the leg detail need reconciliation. Inspect the leg notes before using this record for timing or navigation. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
Waypoint introductions and full write-ups
1. Enumclaw
Enumclaw sits on the plateau east of Seattle where the suburbs thin out into horse paddocks, hay fields and dairy farms, with Mount Rainier standing on the horizon on any clear day. The mountain, at about 4,390 metres, is an active volcano and the highest in the Cascade range, covered in more glacier ice than any other peak in the lower forty-eight states. It looks very close from here, and it is, which is a large part of why so many riders begin the day in this town.
2. Chinook Pass
At 1,656 metres, Chinook Pass is a gate into Mount Rainier country, and the mountain makes itself known well before you arrive. State Route 410 climbs from the Enumclaw plateau through dark Douglas fir and hemlock, past the little settlements of Greenwater and the access road to Crystal Mountain, and then breaks out into subalpine meadows where the great white cone appears over the shoulder of the road. Rainier stands 14,410 feet, and on a clear morning it looks close enough to touch.
3. Tipsoo Lake
4. Cayuse Pass
Cayuse Pass sits at about 1,430 metres on the eastern flank of Mount Rainier, and its main job is to be a junction. State Route 123 comes up from the south along the Ohanapecosh side, State Route 410 arrives from the north out of the Greenwater valley, and just beyond the crest the road keeps climbing east toward the higher Chinook Pass. You arrive through old-growth forest, Douglas fir and western hemlock so tall that the road feels like a tunnel, and then the trees thin and you are standing in subalpine meadow with the mountain somewhere above you, usually in cloud.
5. Mount Rainier
Everyone who rides around here is really riding around one object. Mount Rainier is a stratovolcano of roughly 4,400 metres that rises out of the Cascade foothills with nothing of comparable size near it, which is why it dominates the sky from Seattle on a clear day and why, from up close, it seems to have its own weather. Locals call it simply the mountain, and they say it with the tone people use for a moody relative.
6. Back to Enumclaw
Return visit. Read the place description above.