I believe that God made me for a purpose… for China. But He also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure.

- Eric Liddell

Well, though my purpose (at least for the next few years) is becoming quite clear, it is not China. But that is beside the point. Weekend before last (has it really been that long?) I went out camping with a large number of fellow interns to Mount Rainier. It was a very good time all the way around, and a portion of it I will try to recapture here.

Originally I was going to be a driver for the trip. I was all ready to go, but as it turned out, as the deadline approached, people dropped out. So my car rental ended up being cancelled, and I went with one of the equipment drivers, Peaches.

He and I first went out of our way, a ways off to the south and east of the city, to pick up some cheap-as-free firewood from a gracious full-time employee. Then afterwards we stopped so he could pick up food for his campsite and so we could eat dinner. We were already much to the east of the typical route to Mt Rainier, and time was getting on. Alas, my compadre did not have a CD player in his car so my number one and number two most recent company store purchases, which I had brought for the purpose of listening to, were worthless. Instead, we had to make do with his iPod touch, which nevertheless happily had some Beethoven on it, among other things.

None of this, however, changed that we were running late. Catching beautiful glimpses of the mountain as we drove in on the road less traveled, we began to get a taste for its beauty. I warned my companion that I would dearly like to take a picture, and may howl for him to stop, but he should not listen to me since we had to get there and make sure our tents were set up and everything (since doing so after dark would be a pain). So I have no pictures of this. A little after 9, as the sun made its final descent above the foothills of Rainier, we were half an hour out from the campsite, on our final approach. The sun’s rays turned the sky and its clouds shades of violet and pink, and the lighting touched the edges of the (by-now) verdant green pines with gold, as the trees marched off in progressively pastel greys and blues across the hills and into the horizon. We passed a lake, brimming with the deepest blue and textured waves, occasionally but rarely catching a bit of sun as that perfect sphere sunk beneath the hills. And there were we, both our windows rolled down so we could feel the cool dusk air and the texture of the wind (and what a sound it ran past my ears!). My companion was taking the curves of the mountain road at roughly sixty miles per hour, both of us laughing like crazy people (it was so pleasurable, we did not know what to do – I myself felt like my chest was going to burst open). I was gasping for air in part from the wind catching my throat (as my head was slightly out the window), and partly hyperventilating from the absolute sensory overload I was experiencing.

We arrived at the campsite after dark, and there I found that only one member of my campsite had arrived. We set up what became our tent, worried that the rest, who were all in one vehicle (and also supplied with our food), weren’t going to make it. But they did, close to 11.

Each campsite – and there were about seven or eight of them, each with about six people – was responsible for their own food. It turns out that Alex, the guy who took charge of my campsite’s food prep was a rather experienced hiker – he’d summitted Mt Whitney a few months before during Spring Break – and had recently sustained a mild foot injury and couldn’t go hiking. Alex it turns out, also likes to eat really well when he goes camping. I, for one, do not know that I’ll be able to go back to packaged camping food. So the next morning we had omelets and hash browns, along with orange juice and tea, before we headed out. I will be chronicling more food adventures later. While the rest of us went out on our day hike, Alex left to get charcoal from town, drive around a bit, and do some reading out by one of the lakes.

I had, some time prior to the trip, tried to round together some photographers for a specially-oriented photography hike (Alex was actually one of those interested). There was a lot of snow still left, and we ended up just going along with a larger group which was headed the direction I had thought most reasonable, though I realized we wouldn’t be able to make it very far up because of snow. So we headed up toward Reflection Lakes on the Wonderland trail, until we had to turn around at about two miles in because the snow obscured the trail, and headed back down the way we came toward our campsite, then past it and on to Longmire, where we stopped for our lunch of sandwiches and apples and cliff bars. There we were harassed by sparrows, and caught a break.

From there we headed up another trail – a 5.5 mile loop, the bottom half of the Rampart Ridge trail – which turned out to be much steeper than any of us anticipated. (When we got back, one of the organizing members looked it up and reported back that the uphill portion was indeed marked as ’strenuous.’) During this uphill journey I started falling a bit behind – being between the lead group and the incredibly tail group (some of our group had not really been hiking before). I was actually quite ashamed of this – I have, after all, summitted Mt St Helens. But then when the top group got to their first resting spot, I caught up and, asking if anyone was out of water (did I mention we had folks who had not been hiking before?), I pulled a gallon and a half of water out of my backpack. There were ‘woah’s and ‘wow’s and even one ‘this must be too easy for him,’ and I’ll admit to feeling vindicated. We waited for the tail to catch up where there was a repeat of water distribution. (And I’m glad I brought the extra because it turned out we definitely needed it.)

All in all, the hike went very well. I got to know folks better – some in my campsite, some not, a few from my own university – and it was a fun trip. In all it was about an 11 mile hike. I didn’t get much photography done – none that was what I look for, at least – but this was to come later. From this portion of the trip:

When we got back, I hung out with the folks from my campsite and a couple from my university who I had gotten along with pretty well, waiting for a little while for Alex to come back. We reminisced about India. Well, not really – they reminisced about India and I listened and rested my feet.

When Alex came back (and after he and Shaun had gone to go dip their feet in the frigid Nisqually River), our campsite piled into Alex’s vehicle and went off to Reflection Lakes, which you can actually drive straight up to. We had to get back and get started on dinner, but we nevertheless stopped at a waterfall he had seen earlier in the day on our way there. This was definitely one of the most fun experiences – the lakes were in the process of melting and we could get up quite close to them, throwing snowballs and trying to take pictures, just enjoying it, getting further out toward the lakes than we were probably technically supposed to. Here are some pictures of this portion of the journey:

We then headed back to camp, I finding myself once again in the passenger seat of a car going through the park close to sunset (though much earlier this time). Back at camp we found the two co-attendees of my university I mentioned earlier still at their campsite without the rest of their group back yet. We invited them for dinner, which I, along with the rest of the campers, and especially with Alex’s help, prepared.

We had fajitas.

And I don’t mean cheap fajitas (what is a ‘cheap fajita’?), but grilled-on-a-grill-with-charcoal chicken fajitas, served with bell peppers and grated cheese and tomatoes, and sour cream and guacamole, with chips and salsa, and warm tortillas. It was fantastic. Afterward, and after our stomachs had had time to digest, there was beer and smores. Yes, there was a lot of prep work and a lot of clean-up, but I cannot describe just how worth it it was. And there was chatting around the campfire. (And David learned he can metabolize much more alcohol on a full stomach of fajita meat.) And there was much fraternizing and goodness well on into the wee hours of the morning.

I got up early the next (Sunday) morning – sometime close to 6am, or before, I do not remember exactly when – and took my camera and tripod back out to the Nisqually River, which was not far, for some early post-dawn photography. And it is here, I think, that some of my better work of the weekend was accomplished. I took some of the mountain, and true to David-form, got much distracted by the texture of river rocks. To be honest, I don’t know how long I spent there. It could’ve been 2 hours, it could’ve been 1 and half, I don’t know, but somewhere around that timeframe I suspect. Here are some of the results:

I came back and took another half hour or so of sleep, before getting up and helping Alex with breakfast (french toast with berries, sausage, and the remainder of the hash browns). We ate, packed up camp, and then left. I went back with Peaches, and true to how we arrived, we took a different, and also less-traveled, road on the way out. I have a couple pictures from that way out, despite that I was rapidly running out of CF card storage, but I decided not to put them up here, displaying only a selection of what I took (there are of course more on display in my flickr set of the excursion).

So that was the trip. It was fan-tas-tic. I think I’m still decompressing from the whole thing. And clearly it has taken me this long just to get ’round to posting it. Then the following weekend (this last) I also went with (a different set of) friends to Heather Lake, and I have not even uploaded that set to my computer yet. And I am headed out to the peninsula this weekend to visit yet another friend. Ah, my work is never done…