The Mountaineers disembarked from the Tacoma Eastern Railroad branch of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway at Ashford. Parked there was a row of autobuses, each vehicle was ready to haul from seven to ten passengers and their belongings to Longmire Springs inside the park.

When the group arrived at Longmire they were treated to a banquet lunch at the National Park Inn, a plain but cozy hotel opened in 1907 by the Milwaukee Railroad. They did not spend the night there, choosing instead to spend each night of their trip at campsites selected to accommodate their needs and the needs of the horses carrying their supplies and belongings.

A group portrait was taken in the afternoon when the party gathered at the foot of Ramparts Ridge, across the road from the Inn.

All of the Mountaineers were eager to start on the trail to Paradise. However, in order to be sure that the entire group would make it there by dinnertime, they decided to drive an additional three miles up a recently completed portion of the Government Road. Because the road near Paradise Valley was still under construction, visitors were not allowed to drive past the Nisqually Glacier bridge. By the following summer, one-way traffic would be allowed between the glacier and Paradise.

After disembarking at the first hairpin turn above Cougar Rock, the party hiked straight up the valley of the Nisqually River. It was a little over a mile to the Nisqually Glacier terminus.

The Mountaineers crossed the Nisqually River on a new vehicle bridge a bit downstream from today’s crossing. On the other side, in a distance of less than two miles, a switchback trail climbed almost 2,000’ to Paradise Park. This trail has been closed since the 1940s because frequent rockslides make it too dangerous to reopen.

The party had a grueling climb through a cloudbank, the first of many physical challenges on their trip.

They established Camp #1 in lower Paradise Park at an elevation of 5,300’. They were below Reese's successful "hotel" tent camp.

Women and men were assigned separate quarters in the camp where a nearby brook provided water. "Individual reservations were staked by jabbing alpenstocks into any particular spots which looked inviting; and then, to help dispel the pall of thick mist and to cheer up the tired cohorts while waiting for the packtrain to arrive with dunnage, a rousing bonfire was built." ["Around Mount Rainier With The Mountaineers, 1915," Philip Rogers' article in the December 1915 Mountaineer Annual.]