What a GORGEOUS Day!

Megan and I escaped from the blistering heat (yes really, I think the high was 92!) in Seattle to play in the snow on Mt. Rainier. You could say we got more than half-way to the top, and that wouldn't really be a lie because we climbed above 9000' and the summit of Mt. Rainier is over 14,400'. It would be stretching the truth at least a bit, because we started out at the Paradise Lodge at an elevation of around 5500'. We turned around a couple of hours away from Camp Muir (around 10,000'), which is the traditional base camp to get to the summit. We hadn't really set an actual goal on the mountain, so we took our time and had a leisurely lunch which would have been even better if Megan hadn't left the sandwiches to bake in the car! We turned around when we ran out of time and it looked like the weather was starting to turn bad. (Actually it stayed just fine.)
Here's Megan demonstrating glissading, the highly technical mountaineering technique sometimes used to quickly descend glaciers. I myself did not partake in the technique due to my lack of expertise and my fear of glacier grit invading my nether regions.
At times it looked like Megan was kayaking in the snow.

There were lots of people on the mountain, including folks like us on a day hike, and those who had made it to the summit and were heading down. I chatted with a few of them, most of whom seemed to be in a state of near exhaustion.I can imagine what Caroline felt like last year when she made it. The typical Rainier climber climbs to the Camp Muir base camp (Caroline took the Camp Sherman route on the other side of the mountain) and spends a day there getting acclimatized to the altitude. They start out from the camp around midnight in order to summit around dawn, and then head down. So most of the people I was meeting had been climbing or descending continuously for 15-20 hours. And in spite of the great weather, it was cold and extremely windy at the summit, and there was no view because of the lenticular cloud that often forms at the peak.

The scenery was truly spectacular, complete with waterfalls emerging from the base of the Nisqually glacier.


At the lower elevations, the alpine meadows were in full bloom! I expected to see and hear Julie Andrews burst into song at any moment.
Furry creatures took little or no notice of the human interlopers in their midst.

Mt. Rainier is truly the gem of the Northwest, and part of what makes it so fabulous is that it's so readily accessible. Anybody can drive up there in just a couple of hours.