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Walk About Martinez -- Views of Rainier

Mt. Rainier, the flower garden of the Gods, the people hiking and working on it and yoga on trail, this week in Walk About Martinez

August 24, 2011

John Muir called it the flower garden of the Gods and when Congress created Mt. Rainier National Park, they took the boundaries from a magazine article Muir had written some time earlier.  Such was the stature of Muir at the time.  

For the past several days Richard and I have been hiking in and out of the eastern edge of that boundary on the Pacific Crest Trail.  We’re on a series of ridges, first on one side and then on the other and for much of it, right on top.  One minute we’re looking back toward Mt. Adams or the far off Stewart Range to the north and the next, as we round a bend, we face the vastness of Mt. Rainier.  It plays peek-a-boo with us for days and each time it appears, it’s just a little different.  Cloud cover or the silhouettes of trees against the white of glaciers, flocked with meadows of flowers under its massive flank, or maybe just a hint of white, a dome or a slip of crevasse broken ice through the trees, all ever changing as we hike.  We first glimpsed it to the north, but now are looking back at it far to the south.  

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It’s over fourteen thousand feet high, but once towered at over nineteen thousand feet, rivaling Denali for being the highest peak in North America.  Like Mt. Saint Helens a few years ago, Rainier blew its stack in a cataclysmic eruption, losing five thousand feet of its top and causing mud flows that covered a huge area of WA, partly filling in Puget Sound.  Now its covered in glaciers and just below that, flowers.  When I hiked the Wonderland Trail several years ago with Richard and our friends, Dave and Sharon, we saw wild flowers like we’ve never seen any place before, acres of glacier lilies ankle high, then lupin, bear grass and tiger lily at knee level, and eventually slopes of cow parsnip and flowers I have no name for over our heads.  Muir was right, and the ridge we’ve been following this year is brilliant in a floral palette of purple, blue, red, yellow, gold and white.  It’s breath taking, and part of the reason to hike this wild country.  

The other reason, beyond the sheer beauty of these mountains, is the people you meet in such places.  It seems to bring out the best.  As we approached Chinook Pass, we could see that the Chinook Arch was undergoing some major reconstruction.  It's the entrance to the park and a pedestrian bridge, over which passes the PCT.  The stone towers had been dismantled and huge newly cut beams, each a whole tree trunk, had been lowered into place. When I admired the hand work on the beams, the crew took me on a tour of the construction site, and Barry McMonagle, the carpenter who had shaped the beams with a double bladed axe, explained the work in detail.  Our tax dollars at work in the right hands, and in the right place, these guys know their stuff.  The work will be a fitting modern tribute to this magnificent park.  

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A bit further up trail I passed the Harvey family on their way for a short backpack trip with their two young children and dog, everyone carrying his own pack.  No more important seminal outdoor experience can be given to children than hiking with mom and dad.  I remember my first backpack trip into the High Sierra as if it were yesterday.  The Minarets, the John Muir Trail, and my mother working her way down a cliff from Upper Iceberg Lake hanging onto willow branches when my father couldn’t find the trail.   Wow, could there be anything more fun than that?  That's a long time ago, but that trip cemented a lifelong love of being in the woods.  It’s the cure for Nature Deficit Disorder.  Start them young! 

Then for a short time I hiked with Anne, her son and Susan, a retired teacher of the deaf.  Anne is a yoga teacher at Normandy Park Yoga in Seattle,  and when I mentioned that I try to get to as many yoga classes as I can when off trail, without hesitating she quipped, “There’s nothing stopping you from throwing in a ‘down dog’ in camp.”  I said that after hiking the miles I do, I was much too tired to do a downward facing dog in camp.  It was a flip answer, shot back so as not to have my own routine shaken.  I usually am quite tired in camp at night.   But what she said sank in, and by the next morning, I realized that I wasn’t tired early in the day, and the first little, half in flowers, grassy hummock I came to, I stopped and threw down a “down dog.”  The stretch felt so good I worked into sun salutations and finally some seated twists.   I had a new back and had just physically welcomed the day like I’ve never done before on trail.  Thanks Anne, and sorry for the flip response.  What a great lesson from a stranger.

Soon after we were overtaken by two young guys barreling along the trail.  I spotted the Ultra Light Adventures pack, typical of long distance hikers, and asked if they were “thrus.”  It was Rhino and Dirt Monger, blazing trail, probably within the first nine or so north bounders from Mexico this year.  The trail was just crawling with great folks.

Climbing to a high pass, at one point we could see Mt. Rainier, Mt. Adams, Mt. Saint Helens, and far in the distance, just the peak of Mt. Hood in Oregon.  The Cascade Volcanoes tower above this land.  The view is breathtaking.  

Then we met Tim Overland.  He’s a local who worked this very trail in 1970, measuring the distances and building it.  Now in his sixties, he’s a long distance runner and dreams of completing a thru hike himself.  We walked for several miles together and he had the name for every flower I misidentified.  He knew the land like the back of his hand.  His trail name is Ridge Runner because that’s the place he likes to run, walk and camp.  Right on top of the world.  

When we came to Big Crow Basin, a beautiful glacial cirque, where Richard and I planned to camp, he told us that two years before he had camped right there. He had awakened early, just in time to see ten elk come down one slope to feed in the meadow.  Then twenty mountain goats moved down from the other side for an early morning graze.  Into this bucolic scene, right through the pass high above, burst sixty or more elk, stampeded by something, charging down into the meadow, splitting the herd of goats in two.  They all scattered up the hill sides and in a few moments it was quiet again, and Tim had seen the greatest wildlife episode of his life. 

Tim was hiking in commemoration of the death of his brother, who died on nearby Norse Peak just three years ago.  Tim had some depth and a beauty of spirit to him, but that’s something I often find in people on trail. 

Camped in this lush green basin in a small copse of evergreens, I fell asleep to the bugling of elk not far off.  The eerie sound, like a high pitched squeal through a long pipe, tells me all is right in this little piece of the planet.

The next day took us further along our ridge, changing the view of towering Rainier again, which was now to the south of us.  At times only its domed peak was visible above the ridge.   We passed through Government Meadows to the Urich cabin where I had fired up the wood stove and spent a warm night last year on my own thru hike.  We then found ourselves climbing over countless blow downs in a burned forest.

Water has become an issue, something that just doesn’t seem very Washingtonian.  But up on that ridge, the streams begin lower down.  One important spring in a long dry stretch is described as “noisy” in our trail guide, and sure enough, we heard it but couldn’t see it from the trail.  The water was icy and bubbling straight out of a rock in a sloping meadow.  We got more than we needed as we planned to “dry camp” that night on the ridge.  We ended the day stealth camping in a thicket of young trees high on a bluff.  

Just at dusk a figure appeared on the trail and we gave a call, recognizing Hop Sing (see last week's Walk About for his introduction, http://martinez.patch.com/articles/walk-about-martinez-back-on-trail ).  But he looked kind of haggard and said he’d been lost for a portion of the day and missed the water several miles back.  He was determined to find his own water, and declined a handout, but did look at the several maps we had.  We were worried for his wellbeing, but early the next morning we found a message made of twigs along the trail.  “I OK HS.”  He’s OK, so are we, and we’re having the time of our lives in a wilderness of vistas, forests, flowers and wonderful people.  

"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity..." 

John Muir  

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