mountains of fun

Today we visited our first US national park, Mount Ranier. We were amazingy lucky wth the weather as it was visible from seattle, with a climate similar to Wales this is apparently a rarity.

Mount Ranier is an active volcano and its gigantic mass looms over you as you approach it. It is pretty breathtaking. We headed for the trails at the top of the mountain in the hope of seeing pikas. It is crazy you can get almost up to the top via the road, although it turned out that the trails we wanted to take were impassable. Instead of hikers there were people snow boarding and snow shoeing.

We were told at the visitor centre that foxes and pikas had been seen on the other road up the mountain which had been closed to traffic due to the snow cover. On the way down the road we bumped into  group of Tibetan monks we had seen earlier frolicking in the snow in their bright orange robes socks amd sandals (a second memory card has malfunctioned so no photos of monks on the mountain top). Just another one hundred metres around the corner and we spotted something in the road.  It was a hoary marmot, unaware of our presence it went about the business of collecting bedding for its burrow. Only when its mouth was stuffed full of grass did it head back across the road and into the snow to find its burrow.  Around the corner and less than fifty metres further down the road we spyed something on the sunny kerb to our left where the snow had melted to expose the grass beneath. . . .a very sleepy fox.  It wasn t at all bothered by us being near and continued to laze about ocasionally recurling itself or leg stretching.  We saw quite a few new bird species too.  It was easy to identify them as they were all featured on the `please do not feed` poster in the toilet! We made the most of the longest day and then set off late for Seattle.  On the way back our Sat Nav gave up the ghost and left us to remember the way but somehow we went wrong and ended up going round in circles until about midnight when we stopped to ask directions at a shop where a very kind man said he was shutting up shop and drivng home past downtown Seattle so we could follow him and were we going to a party? Sadly no parties followed but we did get back safely to Seattle.

foxy!

high (as in top of the mountain -get it) camp