John Muir, the famous conservationist and friend of President Teddy Roosevelt, once said "of all the fire-mountains which, like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest in form." To his point, Mt. Rainier is spectacular. The most dangerous active volcano and the highest peak in the Cascade Region, the sheer magnitude of this mountain goes without saying.
Muir continued to say that Rainier was "the most luxuriant and the most extravagantly beautiful of all the alpine gardens I ever beheld in all my mountain-top wanderings." An alpine garden indeed, the mountain was covered with several varieties of wildflowers. White, orange, yellow, purple, and red dotted the trail sides as I hiked the Skyline Loop Trail.
I made the climb up to the Panorama Point and caught a glimpse of Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood in the distance. To the north and east side (out of view) loomed the North Cascades and Olympic National Park ---to be visited in the coming days!
Of course, no trip to Mt. Rainier is complete without jumping into a lake. So I took a cold plunge into Louise Lake after clearing it with some of the park rangers...
...and decided to act like a fool. (try balancing your camera with a 10 second timer on a wooden log in the middle of an abandoned lake by yourself while flipping your hair back.)
