Top 5 day hikes in Washington State, from Mount Si to the Sunrise tundra

This is the one where the road does nothing for you. The summit is 3,900 feet and the climb is 3,150 of them, so the parking lot sits barely above the floor of the Snoqualmie Valley. Eight miles, all of it up and then all of it back down.

The Washington Trails Association calls it the most popular hike in the state and puts the traffic at upwards of 100,000 hikers a year. Go anyway, and go early: the association says the lot overflows on any nice day, and on plenty of the not-so-nice ones.

The mountain is a DNR Natural Resources Conservation Area, 13,735 acres designated in 1987 to protect old-growth forest, wildflower communities and mountain goat habitat. Two miles up, at a place called Snag Flats, there's a boardwalk and an interpretive display about how an older forest works.

The trail you walk was rebuilt in 2005 and 2006 by DNR and the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust after decades of use started eroding it. It shows. This is a graded, maintained staircase of a path rather than a scramble.

One current note: DNR closed Mount Si, Little Si and Mount Teneriffe for a period in 2026 over bear activity and reopened them on June 18. The alerts box on the NRCA page is where that kind of thing appears, and it's worth a look the night before.

If you only have one day in the North Cascades, spend it here. The loop leaves the Rainy Pass picnic site at 4,860 feet, climbs to a ridge at 6,650, and spends the middle third of itself above the trees looking down on two lakes at once.

The Forest Service calls the climb to Heather Pass and Maple Pass steep, with the trail above tree line in a high alpine zone, and the descent beyond the summit steep and challenging. Neither half is technical. Both are relentless enough that most people are glad they brought poles.

You can walk it in either direction, and the Forest Service only describes one of them: up past the Lake Ann junction to Heather Pass and Maple Pass, then dropping quickly and steeply into timber before a last quarter mile on the paved Rainy Lake trail. Go the other way round and that steep drop becomes your climb.

The agency's own line about the season is the one to remember: snowmelt sometimes lingers into mid-July, making it difficult to follow the trail. On a loop where a section traverses a steep hillside, a snow patch is the thing that turns people around.

Then there's October. The Forest Service calls this a top destination for fall foliage and warns of very crowded conditions and very limited parking, and it means it. The page tells you plainly to be prepared to choose another hike if the lot is full.

Sunrise is where this list runs out of road. The Park Service puts it at 6,400 feet and describes it as the highest point one can drive to on the mountain, with the summit 8,000 feet higher again. You get out of the car already above the trees.

From there the Burroughs Mountain Trail crosses what the Park Service calls the most accessible tundra in the Cascade Range. Tundra is the right word for it. This is a gravel plain of volcanic pumice with ground-hugging plants that the park describes as extremely delicate and slow growing, which is why staying on the tread matters more here than almost anywhere.

First Burroughs is 4.7 miles round trip for 900 feet. Second Burroughs is 7 miles for 1,150. Both start from the Sunrise parking lot, and the Park Service describes a loop out along the Sunrise Rim Trail and back on Sourdough Ridge, walkable in either direction.

The Park Service allows three to six hours and describes the trail as narrow and rocky with areas of steep drop offs. That's the ordinary summer condition, before you add snow to it.

Go in the last week of July or the first week of August and you get the flowers as well. The park says many are blooming by mid-July and the meadows should be very impressive by the first of August. Whether that holds in a given year depends entirely on when the snow left.