At the end of December, my taller half and I went down to Mount Rainier to do some snowshoeing. Rainier is a special place for us, and maybe for anybody who spends any amount of time in Washington state and occasionally looks out the window. It’s the tallest peak in the continental US (Alaskan translation: it’s no Denali, but it’s aight.) and it’s visible from most of Seattle and Western Washington. We get down there a couple times a year, and we picked a good day this time, because it was perfect blue sky.

We got a winter trail map from the ranger station and headed up from the parking lot, following the well tramped trail that others had left. The snow was well crusted, so the whole mountain had that perfect candy icing look. The sun made it all glitter, and there was no wind, so we were stripping layers pretty quickly. You could tell there had been a recent storm, though, because of the way the trees were crusted with snow. On one side, they all had snow clumped on them in really cool finger-shaped formations, which were several inches long.

 

My taller half is the sort who doesn’t leave the house for an outdoor adventure without his camera, so we spent some time examining and photodocumenting the trees and their frost.

 

 

A couple gray jays came to check us out, since there are enough people on the mountain that they expect some food. We saw some tracks, but no other critters. I assume the tracks were foxes, though, because on another snowshoe in the same place we saw a black fox tootling around.

We made it up to a good ridgeline and took some more pictures. There was a group of guys up there eating cup noodles. I am not a fan of individual styrofoam packaging, but cup noodles as your snack on a winter hike is pretty dang brilliant. We tend to eat apples and cheese and trail mix, which is fine, but I have a not-so-secret love affair with ramen noodles, and I was jealous.

 

 

The whole time we were up there, I kept thinking about a scene I had recently written wherein a character crosses over a mountain in winter, on snowshoes, and trying to take in all the details. I meant to share some of the pictures from the day back in December, but, you know, life. I’m just getting back to that section in my revisions for Sobel’s Skin, and went to review the photos and think about how I can incorporate the weird frost on the trees into my descriptions. It occurred to me that my original idea for Sobel and the Isobel the Bear-Eater series started while I was hiking down by Rainier last summer, on the day that my taller half was doing a 150 mile ride around the mountain. The storyline has developed to include the strong presence of an enigmatic mountain which I didn’t think had anything to do with Mount Rainier, but perhaps it does. Maybe next time I’m stuck, I should head down there again.