Even though the pictures are beautiful, standing at the foot of these incredible mountains takes your breath away.
Our first day at Mt Rainier National Park was very cloudy and Rainier’s peak, at 14,411 feet was above the clouds so we didn’t get any good shots of the mountain. There were a lot of the lower ridges we got some beautiful shots of as well as Reflection Lake and Myrtle Falls. Our second day, Cindy was driving and I was able to get this great video clip on the road to Sunrise Lodge. Day 2 weather was perfect and one of the highlights of the day was watching a helicopter rescue on one of the smaller mountains.
A Day In Paradise
I once heard it said that 10 days immersed in nature will do more for your mental well being than 10 years in therapy, so spending the day in Paradise sounded like a great idea!
The view points along the drive up to Paradise yielded some really great shots in spite of the cloud cover. The shots of the lake in this group is Reflection Lake which on a clear day you can see Mt Rainier reflected in the water. Even though we couldn’t see the mountain reflected in the lake, the mountains all shrouded in mist seemed ominous and mystical.
Myrtle Falls
One of the attractions that requires you to hike in was Myrtle Falls. It was just under a mile but uphill all the way. This is a brief clip of the falls themselves followed by a slideshow of some of the pictures we took along the way.
The climb to the falls was pretty grueling for us old folks but we were on the face of a hill that was on an open side of the hill that gave us some great angles to capture more beautiful mountains. There was a creek running near the path and we encountered some smaller snow drifts that had melted from below to create an interesting little cave below.
One of the things Cindy really enjoyed a lot was the meadows filled with colorful wildflowers and so we got a number of pictures of the various flowers we found along the way. The entire park was alive with color from all the different wildflower varieties that cover the meadows everywhere you look. The following image slider is a compilation of the fields of flowers along the way.
The weather for our second day at the park was as good as we could have hoped for. Nothing but clear blue sky and temperatures in the low 70’s the entire day. The beautiful weather gave use some equally beautiful views of Mt Rainier and many of the surrounding Cascade Peaks. We only ventured out for one moderately easy trail but were treated to more amazing views of this impressive mountain. The best part of digital photography is that you can take lots of pictures without worrying about running out of film. The hard part is picking the best of those to put in a slideshow here.
For our lunch we found a great area with picnic tables and a million dollar view of the mountains and got to watch a helicopter rescue on one of the smaller mountains. It’s hard to see the small details in the video but they dropped some sort of basket down to the people they were rescuing and then transported them out. They made 3 trips and I got one on video. The trees obscured visibility to the actual rescue on the ground but it was interesting to watch what little we could see.
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