as the newest junior rangers...

As promised, Mount Rainier pictures. We got up on Saturday morning, picked up a tent from a fellow intern who lives around here, and headed out toward Mount Rainier National Park. If you have never been there, I highly suggest going. Every view is absolutely stunning. Definitely wait to go in the summer, because many of the roads are only open during those times.
I'll stop advertising now. We got there and camped at Ohanapecosh. It's in the southeast corner of the park. We set up our lovely 2-room tent with a long discussion of which poles went where. The poles were color coded, but there was no way to tell which color went where. We were situated right beside a river, so we went down the hill and poked around for a bit, then we unloaded everything we didn't need in the car and headed out to find something to do. We got our map of the park and headed toward Paradise. There are two main areas in the park: Paradise and Sunrise. Sunrise isn't open until July, so we couldn't go there. Paradise is under construction and was a bit crowded because it was the highest point open to cars while Sunrise was closed. We drove up there and took tons of pictures and ate barbecue sandwiches in the grill. It didn't seem like there was a specific trail (all sorts of snow everywhere), because there were lots of people wandering in a general uphill direction. My favorite were the women in saris trying to hike in the snow. Because there wasn't a distinct trail that we could see, we asked a ranger, who sent us to another part of the park for what she thought was the most amazingly beautiful trail ever. Some of us were in sandals (mind you, we were fine with that, since we'd already had a snowball fight in our sandals), so she didn't want us in the snow. We went to her trail, the Trail of Shadows, and learned that it was 0.7 miles total. It was a flat trail that wandered the edge of a meadow. The trees were quite beautiful and tall, but we were looking for something a bit more hike like. We decide to head to something we see on the map, Grove of the Patriarchs. Turns out to be a rather short trail too, but the trees were ginormous. There were some twin cedars that were supposedly 1000 years old. and completely rotten in the middle. Very cool trail. There was a bridge over a river that was quite wobbly and didn't suit me at all, but I made it across alive. Yay!
We cooked burger meat and onions and potatoes and peppers in tinfoil over the fire that night. Yum! There was so much food in those packets. We made s'mores and sat around the fire until we all got tired and decided to go to bed. The next morning, we made omelettes in baggies and prepared an entire loaf of peanut butter sandwiches. We packed up the car and set out to Silver Falls. Quite a cool waterfall. You hike along these rapids for a while. We actually thought those were the falls. Then we walked a little further and found the real waterfall. It wasn't that tall, but the sheer volume of water flowing was quite impressive. Lots of pictures of that. We started toward Chinook Pass (we were going to hike Yakima Peak) but were delayed when we came around a corner and saw some people on the side of the road and dust on the other side. We stopped and found that their motorcycle had hit some gravel and run off the other side of the road. The bike was sitting on the side of the bank. The riders were both okay other than some scrapes and bruises. We left some of the group with them along with some water and bandages, then Ben and I drove to the nearest place we could find a ranger to get some help. We went back and stayed with the couple while we waited on the rangers. Several trucks came up and started bandaging them up and asking lots of questions while they waited on a tow truck. Ben and Steve were handed stop/slow signs and sent to either end of the area, but the curve was so tight that they couldn't see each other, so the rest of us spread out and directed them so that they wouldn't cause any other wrecks. We ended up directing traffic for about an hour and a half. The gentleman who owned the motorcycle took our names and addresses with him and the rangers thanked us and sent us to a visitor's center to get Junior Ranger badges. We got to the visitor's center and the lady there acted like she was very loath to give the badges away. We told her what we had done and how we had helped, so she gave us badges and made us raise our right hands and swear to do our parts to help out on the roads and the trails and anywhere or something like that. We all promptly wore our badges around like the big dorks we are.
Once we had gotten back on the road, we headed again to Chinook Pass, but we decided just to stop there and eat lunch rather than hike. We ended up hiking anyway, as we wanted to picnic in the snow and do some sledding. So we trekked up a hillside and ate our peanut butter sandwiches in the snow overlooking the mountain. It was quite incredible.
We made it home, safe and sound, and are resting for the next two days before we head out bright and early (6:30) on Friday morning for Portland. Rumor has it that the biggest fireworks show west of the Mississippi is there. Actually, it's on the bridge between Portland, OR and Vancouver, WA. Pictures of Portland to come, I'm sure.