The Adventures of Brownie Orange Dotson: Mt. Rainer and Yakima, WA

We all know how Mike and Jeannette love to travel to Seattle. This time, Mike and Brownie are on their own and they aren't stopping in just Seattle! Mike is taking a small vacation and a class in Yakima, WA, but in order to get there he had to fly into Seattle first. Yakima is on the other side of the mountain range, so he and Brownie decided to take a little detour and stop in Mt Rainer National Park for a night.

This was a last minute decision so when I made the reservations online I failed to pay close attention to which National Park hotel I was staying at. About an hour outside of the park I lost all cell phone signal. I knew about where the main National Park Inn was (which is the link I clicked to make the reservation online), but when I finally got there, they had no record of it. I'd seen signs for "Paradise" and recalled that name from the website. Is that where I was supposed to go? It was another 14 or so miles through winding mountain roads and I had no way to look it up for sure on my phone. (I suppose this wouldn't have been a problem if Jeannette was going because she prints out all of that information.)

As Brownie and I made our way up the road we started hitting the cloud cover. It's not exactly fog when you're driving up into the clouds. :) Anyway, we made it to the Paradise Inn, which by the way, we couldn't even see the building from the parking lot.

Here is a picture of Brownie from out room window:

However, as luck would have it, the skies cleared up and the place was gorgeous in the morning! Here's a picture of the Inn, kinda like a large mountain lodge, at about 5:40am the next morning. Inside is a big open great room with tables/chairs and two huge fire places. There is no cell phone service, no Internet, and no TV. There are just a few payphones.

I headed up a short trail that morning and was able to capture a picture overlooking the lodge:

Finally, a picture of Mt. Rainer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rainier

This is my favorite picture of the trip so far, a nice waterfall from the snow melt and Mt. Rainer in the background. Brownie is hanging out on the bridge railing. I think it was in the upper 40s at this point in the morning, but there was still quite a bit of packed snow around at this elevation.

I only stayed the one night, so I set off through the park after breakfast. Along the way there were lots of little lookout spots and trails. This next one is from the "Reflecting Lakes." After seeing it while I was driving by I had to turn around to get this picture... totally worth it!

The mountain roads are really curvy with ups and downs, but mostly downs on the second day. Here I was considering giving Brownie a turn driving. (Note: Don't take photos while driving a moving car, I was stopped on the side.)

Okay, so this next picture, if you look closely above the tree line you can see one straight line above the other. That was the road I took the previous picture on. Lots of back and forth driving down the side of moutains!

The last stop in the park was at "The Grove of the Patriarchs." It's a one mile loop hike to some really fantastic (and huge) old trees. I took this video for Laura of the suspension bridge on the way to it:

Then I got a few good pictures of the trees, but really you just have to be there in person to really fathom the size of these. Here is Brownie in the root ball of one of the fallen trees...

I got a video of Brownie in front of this tree for perspective:

Then there were these twin trees:

And finally this massive one (as if they weren't all massive):

Absolutely beautiful.

The rest of the trip wasn't very visually appealing. :) Once you cross the mountains in Washington, it's basically more like a desert. It was dry, hot, and dusty. I was here for a long range shooting trip with Kevin: