Wednesday found us in Yakima, WA at SunTides RV park. Nice enough place with lots of grass and a small shade tree. We had hoped Yakima had some historic sites to visit, but it seems quite happy to be a major produce production town and not much else. We did pick up some wonderful peaches from a local stand, and I made a peach cobbler. Yum.
Of course the reason we are here is Mount Ranger National Park, we we took our first tour today. The first view of the namesake mountain was well outside the park at a scenic overview in the National Forest.
It looks almost like a painting, but I did no post processing on the picture. We kept getting closer and closer. Sadly some haze/clouds crept in, but not too bad.
There are more glaciers on Mt. Rainier than I have ever seen at Glacier National Park. They are mostly still good sized, though they are shrinking like all the glaciers. The surrounding forest was nice too.
Even this time of year there were some waterfalls fed by glaciers that were decent. On this one, I took a picture of Kevin about halfway down the 168’ waterfall while he was taking pictures of the bottom half.
The park also has some fabulous trees. These pictures were taken in a grove they called Hall of the Patriarchs. Fitting name.
We were surprised at how little wildlife we saw. We visited the Longmire area first, had lunch at the National Park Inn, then drove to the Paradise section which was newer and much more crowded. As we were leaving the Paradise area, there was a rental motorhome pretty much parked in the middle of the road. Guess they had a good reason, because we saw this.
Other than the bear, the only wildlife we saw was a couple of ground squirrels and a few birds. Climax forests just don’t have a lot of wildlife I guess.
Tomorrow we visit the northern part of the park.