On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Today’s submission by Mike In Oly closes out our first week of Parks After Dark!
For this coming week, I think we’ll play catch-up on regular On The Road submissions by featuring 5 of them in After Dark, as well. If you’re scheduled for 5 am below and you would rather be After Dark, or vice versa, let me know so I can switch times around.
The following week, we’ll pick back up with Parks After Dark, Fall Colors and New Orleans. If you have photos to share, have you sent them in yet?
On the Road: Week of October 12 (5 am)
Albatrossity – Summertime in Scotland – #4
Captain C –
?BillinGlendaleCA
TheOtherHank
TheOtherHankOn the Road After Dark: Week of October 12 (10pm)
Steve from Mendocino
way2blue
MissWimsey
Gin & Tonic
Ceci n est pas mon nymAnd now, back to Mike in Oly. Mike, maybe you can be convinced to submit another set of photos from this same park? ~WaterGirl
Mike in Oly
Mt. Rainier National Park simply cannot be captured in just 8 photos. It is simply too big, too extensive. Every place you can stop in MRNP could easily generate dozens of photos, if not hundreds. But I hope these shots will give you an idea of the flavor of the park.
The Ohanapecosh River, one of several rivers flowing off Rainier. The rivers up here are so much fun to rock hound in.
One of the staples of a Pacific Northwest forest is the nurse log. A fallen tree acts as a nursery for numerous forest plants as it decomposes. Eventually being completely composted and leaving the huge trees it nurtured standing in the air.
A typical trail thru the woods. One thing I like about the National Parks is the trails are wide and well maintained.
Heading up into the Paradise area to see the wildflower meadows. The blooming white stalks are bear grass in flower. I love seeing drifts of them like this. So beautiful against all the green.
A close up of some of the smaller meadow plants. There are blooms of every sort everywhere you look, for a very brief time.
Marmots are used to people on the trails, so are easily seen as they bask in the sun or go about their business of making hay for winter.
The meadows are a joyful and exuberant show of floral fecundity. They have such a short time so everyone has to show off at once. Competition for pollinators is fierce, and for the plant lover there are surprises and delights everywhere you look. This photo is a bit deceptive tho. With very rare exceptions, I dislike people in my photos and that was very hard to do on this trail around Paradise as it was a nearly solid conga line the entire way. I was always looking for angles that would show the landscape and not the human throng. Keep that in mind if you visit. There are so many other less congested trails in the park. But for wildflowers this one can’t be beat.
The peak of the giant stratovolcano itself, with bonus glacier. Most of the snowpack is gone and the ice is slowly making its way downward to feed the rivers that keep the forest going in our dry summers.
The Former Special Operations Bubbas Sought To Provide Private Security in Minneapolis On Election Day Are Going To Be Breaking All Sorts of Laws
Yutsano
Question: would anyone be interested in some pictures I took of Mt. Rainier/Tahoma from the air? Pilots sometimes make it a point to do a loop around the mountain when the flight is ahead of schedule and I got that lucky.
CaseyL
MRNP is one of my favorite places!
A few years ago, I was a hike leader for a local meetup group. I wanted to take people to Rainier, and wanted to do it as soon as the trails were clear enough of snow. I wound up going down there (a 2.5 hour drive each way) every weekend for more than a month – in June, I think; or July – checking to see how much snow there still was.
The mountain was magnificent with snow still everywhere.
Where the trails were still under 6-plus feet of snow, the rangers put out flagged sticks marking improvised trails.
In the chutes coming down from the heights, snow pack melted from the ground up, creating stunning, beautiful geometries under the unmelted snow.
Reflection Lake was still mostly iced over. The few pools of thawed melted water still reflected the peak above them: imagine the frozen lake as an irregular ice-white expanse. with random bits of reflected mountain.
And no throngs of people that time of year, either! Just a few hardy souls in their Yak Trax and poles. It was heaven!
ETA: @Yutsano: Yes! How do you get to do that? I’ve been on exactly ONE commercial airline flight where the pilot did a sweep above Rainier and I had a window seat to see it.
JanieM
Beautiful shots. I hiked in the Olympics long ago, and the 4th pic in this group brings vividly to mind one of my strongest impressions, which is that the forest looks like a lush drapery flung and flowing over the mountains. You don’t get that effect (or at least I haven’t seen it) in the Rockies or the Appalachians.
@Yutsano — sure!
BigJimSlade
I wanna go there!
I don’t like people either! But sometimes one or two is ok.
Auntie Anne
I am fascinated by the nurse log, and all those lovely trees. Thank you for your pictures.
Kent
Weirdly, I lived and went to school in Seattle for about a decade and never actually visited Mt. Rainier national park. Did a LOT of hiking in the North Cascades and Olympics. Did a lot of skiing at Mt. Baker and Crystal Mountain. Did Nordic skiing and telemarking all over. I could see see Mt. Rainier every clear day from my office at UW. But never actually visited Mt. Rainier National Park.
Maybe when you live here it’s one of those things that is always on your list that you never get to. During that time period I was much more into diving so most of my free weekends were spend scuba diving all over Puget Sound and British Columbia. Never found the time to do Mt. Rainier.
During much of that time I was also working remotely in Alaska which has even bigger and more spectacular mountains so flying home to Seattle it never felt important to go visit Rainier.
randy khan
Mountains and meadows. A great combination.
It’s such a big mountain – I love that you can see it from Seattle and environs. It’s a monumental presence.
Mike in Oly
@BigJimSlade: I make an exception every once in a great while if I need them to show scale, but otherwise prefer spaces sans humans.
Kent
By the way, two points of trivia about Mt. Rainier.
First, Rainier ranks as the largest mountain in the lower 48 by far when you measure the bulk of the mountain from base to peak. There are mountains in the Rockies and CA Sierras that are very slightly higher. Mt. Rainier is 14,411 feet while Mt. Whitney, the tallest in the lower 48 is 14,505, so only 96 ft higher. Mt. Shasta in northern CA is the second most massive mountain in the lower 48 at 14,180
Second, it should not be called Mt. Rainier. The local Salish native name for the mountain is Tahoma (or Tacoma depending on the dialect) and there has been an on and off again campaign to properly rename it Tahoma. I’m not sure where it is at right now. The mountain was named by explorer George Vancouver, who named it in honor of his friend, British Rear Admiral Peter Rainier, who never actually visited the Pacific Ocean much Washington. He has no connection to the state or mountain and wasn’t even a notable American like McKinley for whom Denali was earlier named.
Yutsano
@CaseyL: It’s only happened twice for me. This time around coming into Sea-Tac the pilot said we were ahead so he was going to do the loop around. And I was at a window seat with a clear view.
CaseyL
@Yutsano: A clear view and, apparently, a camera :)
@Kent: That is true. Mostly I call her Mama Mountain, though. Also, if the name was still Tahoma, Rainier Beer (of affectionate memory for the ads, though I could never develop a taste for the beer) couldn’t have done the ad with the motorcycle.
Raiiiii – nyeeeeeeer-Beeeeeer
Kent
@CaseyL: I grew up on those Rainier Beer ads. Some of them were genius. Although the Weinhards ads in Oregon were often even better. Those were the days when we had variety in local beer and it wasn’t all Bud and Coors. I guess today is better with all the local microbrews, but sometimes I like a crisp traditional lager that doesn’t make me pucker up with all the hops like all the IPAs. These days you can still find Rainier Beer in the supermarkets sometimes, but it is brewed someplace else by Pabst and shipped to WA in Rainier cans. The brewery closed in 1999
For those who didn’t grow up in the PNW and don’t know what we are talking about. The classic Rainier Beer commercial: https://youtu.be/AKFmc0oZXFI
Also the Frog Rainier Commercial was good: https://youtu.be/JFlxdKbiygg
CaseyL
@Auntie Anne: There’s a grove of protected old growth cedars, “Grove of the Patriarchs,” near the Ohanapecosh.
Some of those trees have trunks 30+ feet around; the trees themselves are upwards of 100 feet tall.
Some have fallen over with their root balls exposed. One particular tree, that I like to visit every time I’m on that trail, not only has its root ball exposed but its trunk has been hollowed out. You can crawl right in, and so can a few of your friends. You could have a small party in that hollowed-out tree!
This trail, BTW, is wildly popular and always crowded in summer – because it’s an easy trail (flat and less than a mile) so entire families can walk it together.
?BillinGlendaleCA
Three years at The U for grad school and many trips up to Washington before then, I’ve never been to Mt. Rainier. I’ve got a shitload of pics from western Washington and no good pics of Mt. Rainier(I’m still kicking myself for not taking my OM-1 with me when I went to grad school. The kid went to Paradise when she visited Seattle a few years ago.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Wait, how am I scheduled for a Parks After Dark? Is that my Italy pics?
BigJimSlade
@Mike in Oly: Well, often my wife is hiking in front of me, so I’m pretty accepting of humanity there, but, yeah, for scale, too, others can be in the shot. Or because it’s a popular place and I’m just accepting it, or not patient enough to wait until there’s a clear moment.
debbie
Just wow.
Cckids
Love, love The Mountain!❤️ What gorgeous pics!! I also have an affinity for nurse logs, they’re beautiful and fascinating.
I know there are a few of us up here; I’ve also got Tahoma/Rainier pics to send, if I can get my act together. One of what I think was a silver fox; I’ve never seen anything quite like him.
There’s probably space for all of our views; it’s a
big.
damn.
mountain.
The Enderville Phantom
1) I am not sure what handle to use or prefer here so it may take a while before this appears. (moderator)
2) We were spoiled growing up as we HAD to spend part of the summer at Mount Rainier. Our mother demanded it as she worked the fountain at Paradise Inn, back in the day, one summer. It was her mountain. My brother used to spend the nights taking dark sky imagery in the park and then proceeded to work mornings in Seattle. I’ve hiked the Rampart Ridge trail many times. Fremont Lookout too.
3) Have a great weekend.
4) Maybe I’ll lurk less and post more/link to images/etc
Gemina13
When I visited WA in 2010, my best friends took me to the Mountain. We stopped at Christine Falls and other spots before we got up to the alpine meadows. I was thunderstruck by how incredibly beautiful it all was – it was like stepping into Middle-Earth. But I was left breathless by all the gorgeous wildflowers, including the avalanche lilies. That visit cemented my determination to leave Arizona for Washington, which I did in 2011.
One thing I love about the Mountain is that she’s so large, she creates her own weather. “The Mountain is out” is how you say it’s nice and sunny. But when lenticular clouds form over her summit, we remark, “The Mountain’s wearing a hat,” which means bad weather’s incoming. Sometimes, the hat is a beret; other times, it’s a picture hat.
My first sight, though, was from an Alaska Airlines plane coming into SeaTac from Phoenix. I had a window seat, and listened to the flight attendant point out Mt. Hood, Mt. St. Helens, and Mt. Rainier. As we rounded the Mountain, the sheer size took my breath away – and then my seatmates started up. “Oh, my God! Is that Mt. Hood? I think that’s Mt. Hood!” I wanted to facepalm.
Mary G
Beautiful. It looks like the Sound of Music movie, except real.
CaseyL
And then there’s the Wonderland Trail, which I’ve never been on, much less hiked the whole thing.
The Wonderland is a trail that goes all the way around the foot of the Mountain. It’s a 2-3 week hike, and a strenuous one. People cache supplies at the ranger stations along the way beforehand, to pick up as they pass through. Takes a lot of planning, endurance, strength, etc.
I wanted to try it, when I was much younger. Now – quite aside from not having the necessary physical chops – I don’t think I could camp that long without going nuts.
(You can do parts of the Wonderland; there is no requirement to do the whole thing. Maybe one of these days I’ll map out one of the less challenging parts and spent two or three days at it.)
Bonnie
I grew up in Tacoma, Washington; and, the view of Mt. Rainier is even more spectacular than in Seattle. I went east for a job for a 20-year period. After I retired and moved back home, I am still so impressed most every day with the mountain. It is breathtaking and sometimes I wonder why I spent so many years away from this remarkable work of God. I also attended Mount Tahoma High School; and was proud to have graduated from the high school named after this beautiful mountain. I tell people I never ever saw anything back east that was equal in its beautiful. Unfortunately, the school I attended no longer exists. There is a another Mount Tahoma High School; but, it is just an ordinary unremarkable school. However, you can still see that glorious mountain from it.
CaseyL
@Bonnie: I’m not sure how much work I’d get done, if the Mountain was right outside my window, and I could watch the way she changes as the sun rises and sets.
WaterGirl
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Oops, that was a copy and paste from the week before and I forgot to edit that heading. The After Dark submissions that are scheduled for the coming week aren’t parks, they are catch-up on regular submissions.
Parks After Dark resumes the week of Oct 19.
WaterGirl
@Cckids: Yes, please, submit your pics of the park!
WaterGirl
@The Enderville Phantom: Yes! One of the things I always like to say is:
“Lurk less, comment more.”
Victor Matheson
I am going to flat out brag and say that I climbed Rainier back about 20 years ago. It’s about a 30 hour climb with a roughly 6 hour rest for some uncomfortable sleeping at a high altitude hut.
Was it dangerous? Well no more so than a party announcing a new SC justice at the White House, so there is that. And anyway, I laugh in the face of danger!
Mike in Oly
@CaseyL: My husband and his brother did the Wonderland Trail in ten days. They are experienced hikers and can really put some miles under their boots in a day tho. It did take much planning with dropping off supplies at ranger stations around the mountain before the trip to pick up along the way. I am trying to convince him to do some OTR posts as he really gets up into the back country of the south Cascades and has amazing photos.
WaterGirl
@Mike in Oly: Good plan. Try harder? Just kidding. :-)
Skookum In Oly
@WaterGirl: @WaterGirl:
LOL! I have been convinced. :-) I’m working on two Mt. Rainier posts with Wonderland Trail pics right now. I’ll need more coffee and a proofreading before I submit, tho.
WaterGirl
@Skookum In Oly:
Just saw them, thank you!!! And welcome.
Edit: Nicely done, by the way. Wow. :-)