Tag: pacific northwest

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Mount Rainier (PNW)

August 14, 2018, Paradise WA

“The Mountain”

In summer 2018 I signed up for a guided mountaineering seminar on Mount Rainier, in the gorgeous Cascade Range.  Four years earlier I visited a friend getting her Ph.D. from UW in nearby Seattle.  It was my first time in the gorgeous Pacific Northwest. While roaming around town, I caught my first glance of Rainier, towering over the landscape.  It was unlike any mountain I had seen before, clearly taller and more isolated than anything in the Rockies, let alone the Northeast.  I asked my friend if we could hike it.  She looked at me like I had three heads and said “What?! No!  You need to like, train for that.  And acclimate.  It’s like a real mountain.”  I decided then and there that the next time I was in Washington, I was climbing Mount Rainier.

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High Rock (PNW)

August 12, 2018, Ashford Washington

In the summer of 2018, I ventured to the Pacific Northwest to take part in a guided climb of Mt Rainier. The day before the program began, another participant and I decided to stretch our legs, post-travel, with a quick day hike. The folks at the motel we were staying at had an unsurprisingly excellent knowledge of the region and its hikes. They warned us to avoid Rainier National Park, down the road.  They predicted an hour-plus line on this sunny Saturday afternoon in August—just to get through the gates!  Instead, they wrote down a list of turns to take via dirt logging roads to a nearby hike outside the park.  The hike was known as High Rock.  For anyone without the inside scoop, Google Maps can get you there just fine.

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