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Rainier, 17 Jul 2005
Jul. 28th, 2005 12:05 amSunday before last: to Rainier with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mh75, dr4b, bhudson. We came in the southeast entrance, Stevens Canyon, to see the Grove of the Patriarchs. Then west to Paradise, and out the southwest.
The trees of the Grove were big. It is odd to be on a boardwalk, out of contact with the ground, but I can understand problems of soil compaction under the human traffic. I didn't manage any good photos; pictures of big trees are hard. Not much I can see to do but put a person by the trunk and shoot for the scale. I was more looking in the low brush, how space was filled up by the glows and dapples and shadows of leaves alive and leaves fallen on the forest floor. (And most of these don't work under the smeariness of even the best images I can get out of my camera -- much less on a monitor.) I wonder if I saw the big trees less because I was seeing with a camera-shaped eye.
Saw from the car window what I thought I recognized from Pojar & MacKinnon as a shootingstar. Indeed, by the parking lot, they have signs on plants. Dodecatheon jeffreyi.
We spiraled around the lodge (which looks to me rather like the Space Needle's pileus has been plucked off and placed on the ground), up to the observation level. We observed cloud. I was turned around by the spiraling ramps and had a hard time convincing myself that the mountain was behind *that* cloud. The information desk hands out schematic trail maps that say "Always carry the Ten Essentials: ... topo map ...". We picked up our schematic trail map and headed uphill.
The trails are paved with asphalt and busy with people, but none of that matters. The meadows are in bloom. Purple lupine (its leaves gathering water beads) and some type of mauve Castilleja at first sight seem to be everything. But there is also something white, and something fuzzy, and occasional beargrass, oh, and very many subalpine daisies. Their ray flowers are the half-colorless violet that you see in a white strobe light, and while this is well and good in lawn daisies it has something eldritch to it at this scale. As soon as you wonder where the heather can be, there it is, pink heather (the needly), and white heather (the scaly). There is something yellow and cut-leaved that didn't stick in my head. There are what might be some montane fawn lily. And might this be green false hellebore?
There were, you will be shocked to hear, sedges.
Oh, and back in the Grove was something that looked much like a macroscopic Aspergillus, but mustn't have been.
As for fauna, we saw deer, some shy, some not. Fat trundling chipmunks, small chittering chipmunks, and a marmot served by Bono's publicist. Russian teens who would no doubt go back to stepping off the path after you took your glare off them. A fox.
For a few minutes, we saw the mountain. A row of specks on it, climbers on the Nisqually glacier.
Some un-linked-to pics here and here.
mh75, dr4b, bhudson. We came in the southeast entrance, Stevens Canyon, to see the Grove of the Patriarchs. Then west to Paradise, and out the southwest.The trees of the Grove were big. It is odd to be on a boardwalk, out of contact with the ground, but I can understand problems of soil compaction under the human traffic. I didn't manage any good photos; pictures of big trees are hard. Not much I can see to do but put a person by the trunk and shoot for the scale. I was more looking in the low brush, how space was filled up by the glows and dapples and shadows of leaves alive and leaves fallen on the forest floor. (And most of these don't work under the smeariness of even the best images I can get out of my camera -- much less on a monitor.) I wonder if I saw the big trees less because I was seeing with a camera-shaped eye.
Saw from the car window what I thought I recognized from Pojar & MacKinnon as a shootingstar. Indeed, by the parking lot, they have signs on plants. Dodecatheon jeffreyi.
We spiraled around the lodge (which looks to me rather like the Space Needle's pileus has been plucked off and placed on the ground), up to the observation level. We observed cloud. I was turned around by the spiraling ramps and had a hard time convincing myself that the mountain was behind *that* cloud. The information desk hands out schematic trail maps that say "Always carry the Ten Essentials: ... topo map ...". We picked up our schematic trail map and headed uphill.
The trails are paved with asphalt and busy with people, but none of that matters. The meadows are in bloom. Purple lupine (its leaves gathering water beads) and some type of mauve Castilleja at first sight seem to be everything. But there is also something white, and something fuzzy, and occasional beargrass, oh, and very many subalpine daisies. Their ray flowers are the half-colorless violet that you see in a white strobe light, and while this is well and good in lawn daisies it has something eldritch to it at this scale. As soon as you wonder where the heather can be, there it is, pink heather (the needly), and white heather (the scaly). There is something yellow and cut-leaved that didn't stick in my head. There are what might be some montane fawn lily. And might this be green false hellebore?
There were, you will be shocked to hear, sedges.
Oh, and back in the Grove was something that looked much like a macroscopic Aspergillus, but mustn't have been.
As for fauna, we saw deer, some shy, some not. Fat trundling chipmunks, small chittering chipmunks, and a marmot served by Bono's publicist. Russian teens who would no doubt go back to stepping off the path after you took your glare off them. A fox.
For a few minutes, we saw the mountain. A row of specks on it, climbers on the Nisqually glacier.
Some un-linked-to pics here and here.
