Mt. Rainier

Okay, what can I say about Mt. Rainier that hasn't been said a thousand times by folks with better writing skills?

I forgot to check the odometer but I know we drove at least 175 miles round-trip yesterday and we didn't even go all the way to Paradise. Hmm, perhaps I should rephrase that!

We entered the park by way of SR 123 on the eastern side of the park where we encountered a relatively long wait at a road construction area. A large portion of the southbound lane had fallen down the side of the mountain and they were moving large amounts of dirt around with the intent of shoring up the hillside. That would be a scary job, working on a huge crane and knowing the hillside is unstable! We missed the turn off to Sunrise when a car pulled out right in front of us (Washington does have some really crazy drivers, but they're polite, crazy drivers) so we ended up in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest where a very friendly and super-knowledgeable ranger turned us around after giving us several tips on places to stop and trails to follow. We've found the national park personnel here in Washington to be absolutely outstanding.

So we hit the visitor center in Sunrise, checked out the trails and saw they all started at a steep angle and decided to pass as Denny has been having some episodes of extreme and scary shortness of breath on a couple of our jaunts. He's decided to have a stress test when we get back to Ohio over the Christmas holidays as this is causing us some concern. So we can't tell you about any neat things to see on the trails this time. I must say that there were a lot of people trekking up the hillsides there and many, many more parked at all the roadside trail heads. We also saw about 20 cyclists pumping their way up the mountain, which has about a ten mile stretch of non-stop ascent before they finally reached a plateau for a break. These folks are in terrific condition! We chatted with one cyclist as he was waiting for his partner to arrive at Sunrise Point; they had covered 32 miles so far and had more to go. I can't even imagine doing that on a flat roadway, much less up a 6 percent grade for miles and miles and miles.

Mt. Rainier is impressive and with our binoculars we could see areas where the snow had broken off showing the depth of the snow level. Apparently the area received far less snowfall than normal this year, so it would be interesting to see the mountain under normal snowfall conditions. A waitress at the local restaurant in Randle had mentioned to us that there were only ten ski days this past winter which definitely was not normal for them.

While heading back towards Paradise we saw a brown shape climb up from the edge of the road and start to cross in front of us. Thinking it was a deer, I was pulling out the camera to turn it on and focus when I realized that it was a small brown bear. He turned his head and startled when he saw us so he scurried across the road quickly and was up the hillside on the opposite side and into the woods before I had a chance to focus in on him. How neat it was to see a wild creature in its own habitat instead of behind bars in a zoo! While still relishing that sighting we decided to pull off the road at a small view point area and have our picnic lunch while sitting on the tailgate of the truck. Denny pulled out the binoculars to check the mountainside for any sign of elk and sure enough, about three miles distant there were two bull elk feeding. One had a particularly large rack of antlers so I tried to get a shot of him, but even with a 10x digital zoom I wasn't able to get a good shot. So we'll just have memories of the bear and elk rather than physical evidence of our sightings.

Rounding out the day we stopped for diesel fuel ($2.59 a gallon, major ouch) and decided to have dinner while we were out at the Plaza Jalisco Mexican restaurant. That was a wise decision as we both had excellent meals and took enough home with us to have a second meal. Plaza Jalisco is in Morton, WA a block up from the intersection of US 12 and SR 7.

It felt good to be home, but before we could even sit down a lady was knocking at our door with questions about our DirecWay satellite system for the Internet. So I explained it to her and we discussed traveling and full-timing and keeping in touch with the world by cellular phone and the Internet for about a half-hour. She's actually the third person who has stopped by to discuss the system since we arrived here in Randle, which is quite unusual. Folks normally ask us what the big dish is, then continue on their way when informed it's for connecting to the Internet. I think they believe it's some sort of super TV dish where they could get a zillion stations or something and when they find out it's not, they're not interested-heh.

So it was another perfect day in Washington.