Biking the Sunrise Road

2026-06-15

The Sunrise Road at Mount Rainier opens seasonally, and for a few weeks in early summer before the gate lifts, it's closed to cars but open to bikes and hikers. That window, if you catch it right, gives you a 7-mile climb straight up toward the highest visitor center on the mountain, uninterrupted by traffic, with Rainier filling the end of the road the whole way.

My friend Sarah and I planned this at Colman Pool on Saturday — the "we should bike Sunrise tomorrow" kind of plan that you commit to before you fully think through the logistics. We drove down separately on Sunday morning and met at the gate.

We parked near the White River entrance and started at the gate, which had a sign up about recreational use being allowed while the road stayed closed to vehicles. That sign felt like permission to be smug about having the whole thing to ourselves.

Seven miles up

The climb is about 2,700 feet over 7 miles, which is not subtle. The road starts in forest and opens up fast, and by a few miles in you're riding through meadow with Rainier directly ahead — not as backdrop but as destination. It's one of those compositions that would look fake as a photo except you're inside it on a bike.

There were sections with wildflowers along the rock walls, and at least one stretch where the road curved up and Rainier appeared framed between the trees below. We stopped more than we should have.

Somewhere near the top

We never made it all the way to Sunrise. The snow started showing up on the road in drifts too thick to ride through, and we'd already been climbing for a while. We found a good turnaround spot in the meadow — flat enough to lie down in the grass — and called it there.

The descent took maybe 25 minutes. Going down a climb you spent 90 minutes on is one of those small pleasures that makes the effort feel double what it was. We loaded the bikes back into the car, drove toward civilization, and went to a friend's lakeside barbecue that afternoon. (Strava)

The next day I drove two-plus hours to the North Cascades for Park Butte. The brake caliper that would later come off on a gravel forest road had been on that car through all of Sunday's highway miles to Rainier. It held through that drive. It didn't hold through the one that mattered less.