Mt. Rainier

We had a late night flight back to DC and we decided to spend our last day in the Pacific NW doing something sort of outdoorsy. So we went to the mountains. Or rather the mountain. Ok, it's a volcano.
Mt. Rainier was asleep, but I guess it's always good to be prepared.

The drive there from Seattle was very pretty. The trees there are different from the ones back east, really tall and slender.
Once we got closer to the mountain and entered the national park itself, the woods were full of huge, knotted old growth trees. They had had more snow than usual over the winter. The two-lane roads were clear, but there was plenty of snow still left.
It was 8 ft deep in many places, and the higher up you went the deeper it got. We were there well into spring, and as the temps went up, spontaneous little cataracts came down.
We didn't see much wildlife. The birds were clearly very used to human contact. They knew well that people bring food, so they weren't shy about approaching visitors to get a free meal.
We didn't feed them, so this bird got bored quickly and left.

Now the mountain itself was stunning.
Real climbers can go all the way to the top but we tourists only went as far as the observation building (I said "sort of outdoorsy" remember?), which was a flying saucer shaped thing with windows all around, some of them completely blocked by snow drifts. From the raised viewing platform in the middle of the building, we could see the main attraction and it's little siblings too.

There are lots more smaller peaks not pictured. They may all have different names, but I suspect it's just one big pool of magma way down below.

And that, at long last, is the end of my vacation posting. Yay! Now maybe I can post about more current events and maybe even (*gasp*) current knitting!