Our next stop was the overlook at the Nisqually River. Here the park provided a map of the glacier that is visible from the overlook. The glacier around the turn of the 20th century extended down past the current location of the bridge over the river. The glacier now is pretty much gone, replaced by a rocky hillside. Al Gore could have used these before and after images in his global warming slideshow, the difference was that dramatic. We next stopped at Narada Falls, which is about a hundred-foot waterfall of the Paradise River. Everyone got some really good pictures of the falls.
The visitor’s center and inn at Paradise were the next stops on our list. This is the most popular spot in the park, and as a result the traffic and parking were nightmares. Betty and Boyd noted how much the park has changed in the 50-some odd years since they have been coming to Mt. Rainier. This is a good time for me to tell you, my dear reader, why Boyd and Betty have been coming to Mt. Rainier for so long. Boyd’s brother Duane was a Marine private in 1946. He was on a military airplane traveling from San Diego to Seattle in December when the plane crashed on the southwestern side of the mountain, killing all 32 Marines aboard. Boyd and Betty have been active in the community of soldiers’ survivors ever since, and have been coming to the reunion of family members for quite some time. (I’ll have more about the Marines in the next post.) They are not happy with the commercialized aspects of the park, and I completely understand where they are coming from. But in order to make something as large as a Mt. Rainier or a Yellowstone Park accessible and enjoyable to as large a number of people as possible, you have to make it easy for them to visit these beautiful places. It is certainly a paradox: maintain the pristine wilderness and have no one but the most hearty adventurers visit, or build highways through them and gift shops in them so more people can visit. It is a question that has been asked since the days of John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt.
I could talk about the historical aspects of national park development all day long, but then you wouldn’t know what happened next on our trip, would you? After a picnic lunch at the Paradise visitor’s center, Jeremy suggested that the four of us (Jeremy, Tracy, Carrie, and I) go on a hike to Reflection Lakes (so named because at the right time you can see a reflection of the mountain in the lakes). The Lakes Trail was about a mile and a half long. Bud and Rita and Grandma and Grandpa took the keelboats (I mean, cars J; there’s Lewis and Clark creeping in on me again) down the road to the lakes. Our hike was really fun, and gave us a small sense of the vastness and the wilderness of the park. We also got some really neat pictures, which you can check out below. We took a lot of pictures today. After we met up at the lakes, Bud and Rita and Boyd and Betty went on back to the cabins at Mounthaven, while the youngsters went on into the park to visit Box Canyon. This is about a 150 foot gorge that has been carved out of the soft rock by the Cowlitz River. It was a truly impressive display of nature’s incredible power. After we walked around the canyon, we headed back to Ashford and had dinner at the Highlander Lounge, where we had some of the best hamburgers we have eaten in a long time. After dinner and back at the cabins, Jeremy started a fire (he’s not that good folks; he had matches and dry wood J) and the four young ‘uns made smores and dodged the mosquitoes. It was a pretty nice end to a day of the good (the beauty of the mountain, the hike to Reflection Lakes, the comradeship with friends and family) and the bad (devastating floods, crass commercialization, and young men dying in plane crashes) of Mount Rainier National Park. The mountain giveth and it definitely taketh away indeed.
See everyone tomorrow when we’ll back on our way to Seattle to catch the ferry to Suquamish and the family reunion. As usual, check out pictures below.
 |
| Day 8 |
--BDC
No comments:
Post a Comment