If you haven't spent time in this area, you might have trouble understanding the extent to which
Mt. Rainier dominates the landscape. It doesn't
dominate the view so much as it
defines it. Ames took this picture a couple miles from the house:
You can see Rainier from almost anywhere here, except the house where we live: we have some tall trees right at the east end of our yard.
Rainier is about 30 or 50 miles from our house, so we decided to head on out and take a look. We didn't actually anticipate getting there, but we figured we'd head out to explore in that direction and take a look around.
There are some interesting things between us and Rainier: Alder Dam was impressive
We wound through several small towns and finally got to
Mt. Rainier National Forest. A day pass is $15, a 12-month pass is $30. So we bought a year pass.
We never actually got to Rainier, which wasn't really a surprise. But we did manage to go for a walk in the foothills. The landscape definitely reminds me of home:
The "lonely road at the base of the hill" look sure takes me back to BC.
There are a lot of mushrooms on the west coast, and I ended up tagging some in photos:
It was terribly refreshing to walk in the cold damp air. That's a winter-on-the-Pacific-coast thing. We might not get a lot of snow, but the winter damp cuts like a knife. I've been out in the cold (I mean
real cold, not just freezing temperatures), and it has its challenges; but there is a unique coldness to the damp air on the coast. To be sure I've never wintered in Cambridge Bay, but you get the point. Most places get dry in the winter: our winter humidity presents a unique cold.
Anyhow, we spent some time walking on a path that followed a creek up a foothill
The creekbed itself is bright orange, I assume that's clay washing down from deposits upstream, but I don't know for sure.
There were some really interesting branches along the path: trees apparently had some unique challenges in that forest:
We even found a hollow tree.
It wasn't an epic journey or anything, but it was certainly a nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
