disgruntledowl

On our first full day, Mr. Owl and I visited Mount Rainier National Park, which is southeast of Seattle. This gave us our first taste of what is  remarkable about this part of the country, particularly compared to New England: the waterfalls, the glacier tongues, the verdant forests. We hiked along mountain ridges and meadows, weaving through sub-Alpine copses of Douglas firs while Mount Rainier loomed behind haze from the wildfires elsewhere in Washington, Oregon, and California. (This smokiness never really went away until our last day of the trip—more on that later.)

The natural features of the park vary widely within its borders—after another short drive we entered the Grove of the Patriarchs, home to trees several hundreds of years old. Being in the presence of these mighty trees, witnesses to centuries of natural history, was deeply moving. The National Park staff did a great job of echoing these sentiments on their interpretive trails and reminding visitors of the profound integration of life and death in the rainforest. Destructive fires cleared the earth thousands of years ago to make the growth of these forests possible, and fallen trees support subsequent plant growth for decades after they die. 

 

We ended the day at the Trail of the Shadows near Longmire. This portion of the park is named for the family of settlers who claimed the land and opened a short-lived hot spring. Ironically, “Longmire” is exactly what it is: an oblong-shaped marsh that bubbles due to the magma flows just beneath its surface. We arrived there about twilight, which made it too late for us to visit some of the historic national park buildings. The upside was that we were able to see this part of the park at its most gloomy, with ruins of the hot springs resort emerging from a forest growing ever darker by the minute. 
 

This first day was perhaps our biggest boon for wildlife. We saw several Townsend chipmunks on the Mount Rainier trails, including two overfed picnic-area dwellers that Mr. Owl and I nicknamed “the Snack Brothers.” The park was a great place to bird: we saw nutcrackers and ravens(!), and we heard (but sadly did not see) a great horned owl. Later that night, we passed a buck looming by the side of the road and spotted a trio of raccoons scampering down the opposite lane. Being in a very rural part of Washington State definitely helped us see animals, although this meant that dinner after 9 had to be hastily eaten burgers and beers in a rapidly closing townie bar. The upside is that we now know that Rainier beer takes like Yuengling, and therefore pretty good.