It's Always Sunny in Seattle

2018-09-16
Mount Rainier, WA

Today's journey took our intrepid travelers a few hours east to Mount Rainier National Park. We crossed the Tacoma Narrows bridge on the way. That's the bridge formerly known as "Galloping Gerdy" in your physics class movies. Luckily today the wind was light and variable, and also they replaced the bridge.

I'd post some great pictures of Mount Rainier, except that we had low clouds and rain all day so it would just look like a ghost eating marshmallows in a snowstorm. But you can't pick the weather, so you make the best of it. We drove through the park and got a couple pictures of things below the cloud cover. The Nisqually River was running pretty light, or perhaps this is as much as it runs and the rest of the bed is just left as the glacier recedes.

We opted to hike Silver Falls which is a 3 mile loop at the far end of the park. It's mainly forest, which provides some cover from the light rain which continued to fall. The falls themselves are very pretty, and they have this strange tendency to pile up logs on one side. Or possibly that's left over from some crew pulling a log jam out of the falls.

We decided to extend the hike for an extra 2.5 miles by taking a spur to the Grove of the Patriarchs. There's a bridge with a sign saying "One person at a time." The guy in front of me commented on the very faded condition of the sign saying "only for another week."

This is old growth forest, even by the standards of the Pacific Northwest. They sit on an island so they have been spared from fire. The Grove contains trees that are hundreds of years old with some trees over a thousand. Here are some of the large specimens that we saw.

To compensate for the lack of visibility, we decided to take more of an up-close view of the forest. Here's a selection of what you might see if you look close enough.

Today's rule of the road: Never refuse free blackberry pie.

Distance hiked: 5.5 miles.