The Festival of Cheeses, Mt. Rainier's Longmire and Paradise Trails

The Festival of Cheeses was amazing as always. We went to the awards ceremony this year…the first time for us. It was held in the Symphony Hall in Seattle and the Festival followed in the lobby areas. I especially enjoyed seeing the awards announced after having volunteered during the judging. The crowd applauded robustly. One of our favorites from The Summer of a Thousand Cheeses…Kunik, from Nettle Meadows Goat Farm and Creamery…won in its category. The Best in Show was won by Uplands Pleasant Ridge Reserve, made by a cheesemaker couple everyone admires. It was touching to see them receive the plaudits.

Off to the Wilderness

Now that the conference is over, we are off to the wilderness. The drive was not too hard, about 3 hours. The last hour was rural, although the rest was through suburbia.

We stayed Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning at the National Park Inn in Mt. Rainier National Park. There are no cell towers, so we will be delayed in posting this until we emerge again into civilization. The lodge was built in the 1930s and has not changed much. There is a lovely living room with a big fireplace. Our room is modest in size and amenities…but large enough for two happy campers to sip some wine and chill out before our dinner downstairs.  The bathrooms are shared…both the men’s and women’s are down the hall with a couple of stalls each. There are only 2 showers for all the rooms. They did give us big plush robes to wear and slippers too. We will probably tolerate being a bit dirtier than usual. Russ is recording a description which I’ll post if I can figure out how to do that with our new laptop.

Our lodge is about 10 miles into the park. On Sunday, when we arrived via rental car that we picked up at the Seattle airport, we had lunch here and then drove in about 15 more miles to another area with a lodge, Paradise Inn. That lodge is much larger and we are happy with our cozy one. We took a great hike in the Paradise area. It was in the 40s and cloudy…quite high elevation. The wildflowers are spectacular. We also saw an elk, a fox, a Clark’s nuthatch (big as a jay), a family of quail-like birds (Ptarmigans?) we haven’t yet identified, and a marmot. I’ll post a few photos. We got our hiking feet under us, with about a 4 mile up and down…good practice for Florida flatlanders. We hope to hike a lot Monday and Tuesday, but rain is threatened. 

Monday at Mt Rainier

Despite promised clouds and showers, the morning was spectacular. We awoke to a view of the volcano out our window. The shared showers had no waiting line and we hit the trails pretty early. Unlike Sunday afternoon, we had our backpacks and walking sticks this time, thank goodness because we picked another steep trail. No meadows today, huge tall trees climbing straight up a mountain side with us. Really beautiful. The sun stayed with us. Temperatures was in the low 50s. We hiked about 2 miles up in about 2 hours and then back down in about 1.5 more. Going up we sweated and breathed a lot; going down we wore jackets against hypothermia and our knees complained a bit. All in all, it was great. We were back only a short while before the clouds came in and showers started.