Spoke with Mt. Rainier Wilderness Info Center this AM and received the following updated information regarding our cache drop locations:

I left my last cache near the 7 Cities of Gold

• Longmire Station opens at 7:30am on Sundays. That is to say, it will be open when we get there.
• Mowich Lake Station is staffed from 8:30am to 4:30pm daily; we’ll thus want to reach cache #1 at Mowich Lake on Day 3 (Tuesday) no later than 4pm. As it’s 10.2 miles from Golden Lakes, this should be no problem.
• Sunrise is expected to stay open through the end of September; it would take really, really early snow to close Sunrise prior to our expected day of arrival on Thursday (Day 5). Sunrise is open from 10am to 5pm Sunday – Wednesday, and 10am to 6pm Thursday – Saturday. There is therefore a good chance of a burger and beer at Sunrise – more on that to follow.
• Side note: we’ll want to reconfirm all of this prior to cache shipment (end of August) for several reasons, not the least of which is that the nice young woman with whom I spoke seemed mostly certain about Mowich Lake. Mostly. Originally she said that we could pickup our caches at the Carbon River Station; when I pointed out that the NPS site lists only Mowich, Sunrise, White River and Longmire as cache locations she did a little more research and agreed about Mowich and provided the hours. It might be interesting to see if a 3rd cache site at Carbon River is a possibility, and I’ll follow up on that & post info later.

Sometimes you just have to hole up & camp

We now have all of the info needed to submit our application, on the agenda for tomorrow’s dude night.