More Mountains: Rainier and Glacier National Parks

Putting our backs to Fort Clatsop, we turned south then east to find ourselves, for the second time in three weeks, in Silver Creek, Washington. The only attraction there is a Thousand Trails RV Park we've used before. But this time, with no real deadline ahead, we set aside three days to visit Mount Rainier which we had missed on the way north.

Secretly, we're trying to see how many active volcanoes we can walk on before one decides to kill us.

This one just sat there, generating some clouds. Rainier gets a large amount of snow and, as a result, still has several active glaciers growing and flowing from the summit. 

← Here's one, the Nisqually Glacier, which births the Nisqually River, cutting a huge rocky ravine in the mountain's flank in other months than August. This month, the river is well more than a trickle but was not moving any boulders downstream. The white “11” in this picture actually are three large waterfalls issuing from this one slow-moving ice pack.

Their waters joined and noisily ran under the bridge on which we'd stood for this second picture:  →

We spent an entire day traveling around the south side of Mount Rainier and then decided the east side would be more of the same. So we went back to Paradise –some of these RV parks offset the “trailer camp” image with great names– for drinks and dinner. We sat and talked with neighbor, Don, who is a “fulltimer”. He told us he's been living this lifestyle for 7 years. That's just an unimaginable span of time to us, who are away from family and friends going on four months now. He's traveled extensively around the Pacific Northwest and gave us suggestions for future visits.

But not this year. We sat down to look at the calendar and at where we are, which is embarrassing, considering our lofty sort-of goals last spring. We had wanted to travel from this area north to Canada, visiting Jasper and Banff National Parks at the north end of the Rockies before dropping into America's Glacier- and Yellowstone National Parks. Instead, we cut off Canada entirely just as we had cut off Colorado last April and decided to focus on the two American Parks. They are big enough that we thought several days ought to be devoted to each. We'd been at Yellowstone before, back in the last century when our three sons were less tall than we. Of all our National Park visits, this will be the only one we will have duplicated. We were super impressed then and hope to be again.

We did laundry the next day since life is not entirely idyllic, even at Thousand Trails Paradise. Then we moved on to Quincy, Washington, where the Thousand Trails Crescent Bar RV camp is on the shores of a dam lake in a steep-walled canyon. Apparently the developers had been allowed in just a couple years previously so everything looked new and fresh. We liked this well laid-out park.    

 Then we pushed on through Post Falls, Idaho, where we greatly welcomed this greeting:

Nearly $2 less than in The 
Thief State, California

After spending a night encamped in a Walmart parking lot with a dozen and a half other travelers, and volunteering about $100 in trade for groceries, we arrived at Glacier National Park.

Almost, that is. We wanted to camp inside the park itself, because of its size and because Debbie didn't want to pay in-season tourist rates at close-by RV parks. We ended up in a grocery store parking lot in Columbia Falls, while we unhooked our towed Honda to spend that afternoon and evening reconnoitering the 100% No Vacancy Apgar Campground in Glacier, noting which sites would accommodate a 40 foot long RV coach, and which would be vacant before the next noon. We found this a very effective way to get what we wanted

in a typical first-come/first-served federal campground and would recommend the process to any other RVers –especially since we could spend a free night in a parking lot just half an hour away! The next day we moved into Loop C at the Apgar camp after dumping our holding tanks and taking on fresh water. The sites were wooded and well separated. Even our big RV did not look incongruous there next to tents and pop-up campers.  

We decided to stay five days, where Debbie wandered down to the beach with her coffee every morning and John joined her for evening wine.

Debbie also was excited to go kayaking on Lake McDonald amid the mountains on the west side of Glacier NP.

We enjoyed the Ranger-guided walks because these guys know so much that we would otherwise just wonder about. Like these acres of sticks in a thick forest of small, new pine trees.
There'd been a fire.  Lodge Pole Pines, in particular, release the seeds from their cones only in forest fires! The burned out poles will fall and add their nutrients to the soil and Life goes on. The federal government had just come to realize this less than 30 years ago. Interestingly, a Park shuttle bus driver with whom we talked insisted that the technology exists to clear-cut a forest, plant new seedlings and add every bit of nutrition the soil needs –while utilizing and maintaining the timber resource. He said he was a retired Forestry Technician and was more than a little upset with tree huggers whose mental abilities petrify when thinking about those damned loggers.  Do they live in sustainable grass huts?  Have they stopped burgeoning this planet with new babies?

The mountains were carved by repeated epochs of glaciers in this area, leaving these broad U-shaped valleys, distinctly unlike the sharply narrow V's of river-cut valleys. 

 ←

 Here's another → example –a hanging valley– with that narrow waterfall descending into the deeper main valley.  

Wildlife here are Mountain Goats, and bighorn sheep, bears and such.

On the more domesticated side, nearby residents include the Blackfeet tribe of American Indians who, to this day, insist they were cheated out of the use of much of the National Park land by treaty provisions they didn't understand –but signed anyway. The east entrance to the park (Saint Mary Entrance) borders on the Blackfeet Reservation, and features several displays telling their side of this emotionally bitter continuing argument. Interestingly, that entrance is the only one we saw that features the Canadian Flag flying at full staff next to the American flag, also at full staff in this border-crossing Park, with a third flag also at full staff, on equal footing with the other countries: that of the Blackfeet Nation. Until this moment, Debbie and John had no idea that any tribe had it's own “national flag”. Very reminiscent of a scene in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. John says, if you haven't experienced this book, you really should get past the paranormal and sci-fi aspects to see what Heinlein had to say in the 1940's about the Human Experience that is so very relevant to today.

It's near the end of August, so one more Park –Yellowstone– and then we book it for home. See you soon.

Driving Oregon's Coast

We admit, the both of us, that a lack of detailed planning has left us desirous, wanting to see more than we have and wishing to return to scoop up the leavings. Recall that our “mission goals”, in effect, were to See The West & Our Two Brothers. Only the last had any time constraints. Falling within those, we pretty much skipped across Oregon and now find that we want to return sooner than later. Especially the coastal areas.

Apologies to those who are reading in hopes that we do discover Big Foot in the big Northwest. No such revelation. But we did find other Signs that tickled John's whimsy

→ A roadside cafe in Seaside, OR –might even be “Roadside Cafe”: on the east side of US-101, the sign declares it has a Pet Friendly Patio. Just under those words are Wings. Hot Dogs.

→ Not to pick on Seaside, but just a bit farther north there's another wings joint on the right, but with an Asian twist to it. Or should we say, an Asian kink: “Thai Me Up” in big bold letters. O my.

→ Gleneden Beach, OR, features a wonderfully delightful Side Room Cafe that we would recommend to anyone who would like an unusual and extremely tasty lunch or dinner. It also pushes some local wines, but we were driving and had to pass those up. In the men's restroom, however, the management had attracted more than the usual obscene graffiti by installing chalkboards on the walls. 

At least this (not quite ironic) one was explained: 

We hope this is not some 

crassly crude geek humor.

Feel free to educate us 

with a Comment below.

...but neither Debbie, who briefly majored in Math, nor John, whose Calculus study stopped after integrals and differentials half a century ago, can get the point of this statement.

In the previous blog posting we had teased you with a littoral word unfamiliar to us Great Lakes dwellers: seastack. A stack in the sense that it is layered volcanic rock from many, many eruptions. Sea in the sense that it is wet and seems to be disconnected from land, but that is just a visual trick of Nature's erosion powers. One seastack that we'd seen in Northern California was miles offshore, just a big white rounded rock rearing above the swells and blurred in our binoculars. Most are much nearer land.

So gigantic! It sits just under a mile off the beach.

Here's the well known “Haystack Rock” in Pacific City, OR:

.

Another, also named “Haystack Rock,” also one that the cattle had not munched on, is a bit farther north off Cannon Beach. It's only a hundred yard damp-footed walk away at low tide.

It turns out that Oregon's coast is littered with these things which is not surprising to the geologists who consider the volcanic origin, the preponderance of active volcanoes here on our planet's Rim Of Fire, and the layers of that lava and ejected pumice deposited here from as far as Yellowstone! Back on the East coast, where we grew up in the Atlantic's surf, the

mountains are hundreds of millions of years older and erosion has destroyed just about all the rocks along the wide, sandy beaches until you get north of Connecticut. That contrast is what makes this frayed coastline so unusual and enticing to us.

There are other attractions, too. 

The big whales come up close to the steep shores, sucking up their fill of plankton. You can pay a tour boat to take you within a hundred yards of these critters where you might even end up with a photo, or stand on the shore and use the binoculars to record them in your memory.

We stumbled across a kitefest at the beach town of Rockaway (see more sea stacks in the distance).

We tasted the product of the claimed “Comfortable Cows” from this well-known maker of ice cream, and were captured by their cheese factory tour, as well.

The Bry RV parked for two nights at the Blue Heron French Cheese Company's lot, along with a dozen and a half other RV's also looking for an unusual Harvest Host location. Right behind our coach, this locomotive continued to rust along with other older pieces of heavy equipment while llamas grazed outside our dining room window and the goats in a children's petting zoo chewed grass out the windshield. Oh, yeah-- we also liked the cheese we bought there.

Moving north for a couple nights to another tightly packed Thousand Trails glampground, once 

Yes, three other coaches are barely an arm's 

length away from our steering wheel.  

again we remind ourselves this is “free” for the annual fee Debbie paid, and her spreadsheet's CPN (see Mea Culpa  #16 ½)  has fallen rather satisfactorily to less than $15/night. Compare that to many RV Parks' in-season rates north of $60 for just one night's rest with electric/sewer/water/ trash/laundry service and often a pool. 

 We also say, “Selves, you're not here to party. You're here to be close to the places you want to experience, like the site at which Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1805.” Or words to that effect.

Barely a quarter century after this nation's birth, President Jefferson had paid France less than $12-million for the huge tract of the Louisiana Purchase and sent these two men and 31 others to find the Pacific Ocean. They did –just in time to spend the winter along the Columbia River, not far from present day Astoria, Oregon.

Surrounded by the heroic deeds and such, John's first thought was a pragmatic: “Why do the roofs slant into the stockade, given that it rained all but 12 days of the 106 days they were here?”

A well-read NPS Ranger directed him to General Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand Steuben –Baron von Steuben– who was George Washington's brilliant military strategist and engineer. The Lewis and Clark expedition was, after all, a military venture. The two leaders had been taught that higher walls on the outside gave any fort's occupants a clear line of fire to enemy troops trying to invade that way.

“Oh,” said John.

As it turned out, though, the natives were friendly, the enemy Spaniards never did find the explorers, and the rain funneling feature was unnecessary the entire time.

Now it's August. We've two more huge National Parks on our must-see list and we had wanted to be home in September. Let's see how that goes....

Western Washington

We went to Hoodsport. It's on the Hood canal, which is the only true fjord in the Lower-48 states. As Debbie and John continue to be fascinated by this planet, we learned a fjord is a body of water that intrudes into a steeply sided, narrow glacial valley, usually deeper at the farther end.

The entire Puget Sound technically is a fjord. John's brother, Bill, says part of the Hood Canal is used to test submarines. He would know, being a retired Captain from the US Navy.

Bill and his wife, Alex, are the reason that we spent an entire week in the area. The remnants of the Bry family are scattered across the continent. Next year, we plan to visit sister Marilyn and her family back east. We found Bill and Alex at their summer home along the Hood Canal, but as we learned, more than an hour's drive from our RV park. We spent a night in their home just south of the bridge at the top of the canal watching the boats below, including one Navy ship that Bill identified as a Tender, a floating repair shop (John intriguingly saw through his binoculars that it carried a stretch limo on the deck between the cranes; hopefully a justifiable use of our tax dollars). We also visited the attractive Norwegian heritage of Poulsbo and spent many enjoyable hours just talking, catching up. Because of the physical distance between Michigan and the west coast, Debbie hadn't come to know either person very well.  

 Also it's more than a decade since John last visited here. Debbie thoroughly enjoyed getting to know both...and getting to explore the marine life on their low-tide beach a hundred feet under their house along the cliff (remember steeply sided, above?).

While Bill and John watched, the two women picked through the oysters that grow abundantly there with plans for tonight's dinner. Driving back to our coach with half a dozen extra in a cooler, Debbie researched how to cook these things. Even though John's not much of a shellfish fan, Debbie is, and declared that these were the best ever she'd tasted. And huge!

We'd ended up parked so far from their home because we just hadn't realized that everything in this area is separated by water. What would've been a fifteen- or twenty-minute drive in “normal” circumstances turned into a circumnavigating tour of the Canal, which is lined by small waterfront towns with 25mph speed limits. We had an Amazon order shipped to a Locker in Belfair, being the closest sizable town, only to find that was an hour away, as well.

Among our housekeeping chores, we'd had to stop by the Post Office General Delivery because we'd ordered a giant hub “cap” (more like a bowl) for one of our rear double-wheeled axles. We'd discovered a week ago that it was missing and cannot bring ourselves to believe that it simply fell off. Unlike a car's, these things are screwed on with a wrench.  But we cannot prove we were victims of a thief, either. Live and Learn. And spend.

Our RV park billed itself as a “Canal Resort” and was among the nicer of our “glamps” despite the proximity of the neighbors. It featured a dock right on the canal, too. Debbie and I would take our before-dinner nosh and drinks or a bottle of wine across the road just to sit and look at it. The weather was perfectly bright, if not blue, and comfortable the entire time.

Actually this picture is from John's visit in April 2007.
Free free to blame us for the 2019 failure.

The only problem is, facing the canal, our backs were to the Olympic mountains. From the other Brys' deck, the snow-capped mountains were a prominent feature in the setting sun.

The Olympic Mountains are huge, green, and wet. They also act as a rain shield for some areas inland. One town along the eastern Juan de Fuca Strait claims only eight inches annual rainfall, despite the larger area being so constantly damp that moss and mold thrive on everything. Lewis and Clark, the explorers who found the inland route to the Pacific during Jefferson's presidency, had complained that all their canvas and leather equipment quickly rotted to threads in that environment. It was unfortunate that this sort of information was not to be learned here, however.

Instead, we were hugely disappointed that the National Park Service chose to focus on the paranormal Native American spirits that it claimed still inhabit the place. The visitors' center introductory video was disappointing for its ignorance of the physics of the range and its dwelling on the spiritual feeling of it all, full of fall-asleep tuneless music and a voice talent who was paid to talk you insensible: too damn much New Age California Thoughtlessness to be of any value to even a high school graduate. Even the Ranger Program Talk that generally is so educational at any National Park, here was glossy Environmentalist propaganda about why we need to spend our tax money to preserve this wilderness. John kept looking around, but didn't see any obvious Congressional Appropriations Committee members in the audience. Aside from a scattering of Midwesterners, the rest of the crowd was from this part of the country. When the Ranger asked for suggestions as to Why We Must Preserve, the first two shouted out were “Loggers” and “Monetization”.  Seriously?! “Monetization” is so Liberally new it's not even in our spellchecker. And we didn't notice any of them wearing handmade clothing....

Mt. Rainier lords over the
Hood Canal in this view
east from Mount Walker.

The Olympic range is huge. We found our home base was almost two hours away from the National Park visitors' center, in Port Angeles. So the drive north to there and back, including the viewpoints on Mount Walker, consumed an entire day.

From Hurricane Ridge in the Olympics

 The views from Hurricane Ridge were awesome, but after seeing this sort of thing for the past two-plus months, we were less than overawed. We realize this is a bias, but added to the gigantic disappointment of the NPS's spirituality of the Olympics, we won't be back for them.  There are plenty other things we had given up, so our return to the Northwest will be to catch up on only those.

The next day, we were thinking the southern part of the range would be more of the same, so then decided to satisfied ourselves with a drive to see the ocean west of Aberdeen.

With the two siblings' visits accomplished, the rest of our summer is wide open. We want to get back to visit the Oregon coast next.  

Foreshadow:  “Seastack” is a new word in our lexicon.