Camping, Day 2
Girls crossing Silver Falls
The family at Grove of the Patriarchs
Singing Chipmunk We awoke to the sound of hammers and chainsaws. The bathroom in the "B" loop, where we were, was being rebuilt, and the rustic, log-cabin look required a lot of archaic machine tools.
I spoke to one of the construction workers there and it turns out that this is all they do. They're all Federal employees, and it turns out that the kind of log cabin construction that goes on in Rainier is so specialized that only about two dozen men are trained to do it, and this is what they do: go around repairing bathrooms and the "historic buildings" made from logs cut with saws and fitted with chisels.
I was pleased to note that my back doesn't hurt nearly as much as I feared it would. Omaha made a great fire and we all enjoyed a morning breakfast of warm cereal. The items that I listed as missing, I ran into the nearby town of Packwood to pick up, and then returned to get ready for our first hike of the day. We made tuna sandwiches and packed trail mix and then we were ready to be on our way. I caught a glimpse of myself in a bathroom mirror before we actually hit the trail: ack, with my Ironman glasses and REI overnight pack, I'm a stereotype: Pacific NW Hiker, Bulky Athletic Type.
We walked up the Silver Falls trail (about 3½ miles) to the falls (the big panorama in my previous post is at 46°45'18.86"N, 121°33'36.10"W and, p.s., Google Earth now runs fabulous in Linux!), which are huge, beautiful, churning, and then up the west side of the falls to the road, across the road to a picnic area set aside for day trippers. We stopped to picnic. Our sandwiches and water contrasted well with the family next to us, who downed huge sandwiches along with buckets of potato salad and even an open tub of Cool Whip-- what it was meant to accompany, I know not.
Then another ½ miles in to the Grove of the Patriarchs. The ground was so packed we walked it barefoot, except for Yamaraashi-chan, and that was delightful. Along the way the girls stopped and played in the river along with a couple of other families. Omaha was disappointed to see that all of the elk activity she'd seen earlier in the grove was gone.
Along the way we became aware of a relatively new phenomenon: agressive panhandling by the local "wild"life. In the past, we'd visited mostly remote areas (obscure corners of Mt. Baker, or the eastern face of the Olympic Range), but here, where there was lots of human activity, the wildlife was much more confident in approaching humans and expecting to get something out of us. This was especially true at the Grove of the Patriarchs, as it's a very short hike and thousands of people walk through it every day.
After the grove and it's massive, beautiful trees, some of the largest on Mt. Rainier, we walked back, taking the eastern loop. Along the way we saw that dark-furred chipmunk it the bottom image, crooning a very eerie song that faded away as we approached, but never quite disappeared entirely.
Dinner was hot dogs and s'mores for dessert. We tried to play Set, but we have to face reality: Yamaraashi-chan is so skilled at it that nobody else was scoring anything at all, and eventually we had to call it quits and play something else. Give Me The Brain made for a better game.
At bedtime, Omaha read to us aloud from a chapter of the children's classic, Heidi.