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Mount Rainier in Reflection Lake. Photo by Jeffrey Simmons

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Travelogue: Prowling around the Pacific Northwest

Editor’s note: This is the first of two installments detailing the author’s recent excursion into the prickly pretty Pacific Northwest.

By JEFFREY SIMMONS/Staff

“Well he didn’t kill us last night,” I told my wife as I tried to look on the bright side of bunking down next to an ax murderer.
To state the obvious, though, the man with a penchant for suspicious accelerant-fueled bonfires and abandoned school bus habitation didn’t slay us any night of our four-night stay in the wooded wilds of Washington State.
We encountered the pony-tail-wearing-flannel-bedecked escaped prisoner number 666 about two days into our week-long exploration of Mount Rainier National Park and nearby Seattle.
While our lodging establishment’s Web site promised “total seclusion,” a microwave, queen bed, no TV or phone and a hot tub, it in no way mentioned that the aforesaid rustic cabin adjoined what appeared to be a movie set left over from “Deliverance.”
Next to a decrepit pickup truck loaded down with items from an obviously interrupted trip to the scrap yard were the previously mentioned school bus, a tent and a motorcycle of the type preferred by easy riders, drifters and FBI-profiled white males who hate their mothers and like to keep body parts next to the frozen waffles.
There was no sign of human habitation (deer, on the other hand, routinely skipped about the campsite) until later in the week when the apparent occupant began building monstrous conflagrations visible from outer space and the much-too-close windows in our tiny living room.
It wasn’t snowing; he wasn’t roasting marshmallows, so, logically, we had to assume that the towering flames fueled by cord after cord of firewood were scorching away evidence of the last tourists searching for Pacific Northwest seclusion and/or painful decapitation.
In reality, however, our neighbor, while exhibiting odd behavior, did little to dampen our enthusiasm for a landscape on loan from God.
Looming more than 14,000 feet above our heads, Mount Rainier was in a word – breathtaking. No, make that “breatharresting.”
We caught our first glimpse of the snow-ringed volcanic jewel not long after leaving Seattle’s airport on Monday, July 21.
We wouldn’t see it again for two days.
Although it didn’t rain (the “Did it rain”? question has easily topped the list of inquiries about our trip), the weather was, to characterize it in a mildly British way, “misty” on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Undeterred by the dense fog that dripped from saturated branches like a muted downpour, we set out by rental car and hiking boot to explore a 368-square-mile land of waterfalls, wildflowers, wildlife and…white stuff?
While the snow and ice near the mountain’s summit was no surprise, it was a bit odd scooting through knee-high patches of frozen precipitation at the lower elevations after flying out of a 90-plus heat wave in Charlotte, N.C.
It seems that the area received quite a bit of snow this year, delaying the annual wildflower explosion that turns the park’s open meadows into a lookie loo circus in mid-summer. According to prognosticators, the flora probably won’t reach its peak until later this month.
The delayed bloom and midweek visit, however, meant we pretty much had the trails and overlooks to ourselves.
Of course, there was not much to “overlook” unless you’re in to collecting snapshots of impenetrable water vapor surrounded by more impenetrable water vapor surrounded by Japanese tourists. Based on everything I had read, the park, much like other U.S. national parks, often gets loved to death on summer weekends, with insufferable lines of traffic inundating the roadways.
That wasn’t our experience, though, and the overcast, gray skies were perfect for photographing waterfalls and the few patches of hearty trillium and beargrass that had germinated after the icy groundcover receded.
We hiked around an old-growth forest full of firs and cedars that could have kept our serial killer friend’s fire stoked for perpetuity. Some of the spectacular specimens in the Grove of the Patriarchs were more than 30-feet in circumference, plenty big enough to take our compact rental car through their centers, even though I’m pretty sure I didn’t opt for the extra “driving through hemlock” coverage.
We gaped and marveled and generally stood in awe of trees that have existed about 700 years longer than our Democratic Republic.
In fact, we did quite a bit of gaping, marveling, oohing and aahing as we took off on trails that led to a comet-like cascade, a bubbling spring and a hidden lake.
We were alone at the lake when the weather and our wonderment began to change.
After losing the dirt trail to the snow pack, we followed the muddy footprints to a reservoir right out of “Lord of the Rings.”
Encircled on three sides by dark gray talus slopes that I expected to begin spewing out orcs and elves at any moment, “Snow Lake” resembled a blue and green mirror at the bottom of a rocky, snowy bowl.
To get there, we crossed open fields of blooming heather peppered with weathered gray snags and small gurgling streams.
As I told my wife that day, the unfolding beauty “made my soul happy.”
My spirit also laughed a little more when the clouds begin to lift, and we started to see the brooding jagged peaks and slopes that we had missed during our first day’s travels.
On Thursday morning, the skies had completely cleared and we stared at the mountain in all of its blue sky splendor. Then, it was off to the coast to track down lighthouses and the lingering ghosts of Lewis and Clark.
Passing south into Oregon and following the Columbia River west, we spent a few hours at Cape Disappointment State Park, where the mighty freshwater channel merges with the Pacific Ocean. Members of the famed Corps of Discovery visited the area in the early 1800s.
To use another mildly British euphemism, the weather on this partly cloudy summer day was “crisp.”
In my pre-trip-pretending-to-be-a tour-guide planning, I had anticipated a cooler climate, but I don’t think I grasped the extremes that can exist near a massive mountain or costal lighthouse perched atop a rocky promontory.
While shorts and short sleeves were fine inland and lower down, they left me feeling a bit overexposed as my wife and I hiked out toward North Head Lighthouse, a beautiful beacon that points helpless sailors away from danger and hapless visitors toward the gift shop.
Along the way, I realized just how technologically out of touch others often find me – the crazy man without cable, high-speed Internet, flat-screen television or the slightest inclination to text message my thoughts and innermost feelings to my “bff” Brittney.
“Look kids,” the women said stopping to ogle me as if I were wearing shorts in a snowstorm, “a real, live film camera.”
To be clear, I own, use and love my new-fangled digital Canon, but I also relish the reproduction I get with a roll of 200 speed Fuji. Apparently, though, according to prevailing thought, I might as well have been capturing the scenery with a burnt stick and cave wall.
After scratching out a few more images and killing a wooly mammoth with my zoom lens, we climbed up the spiraling lighthouse stairs for a sweeping view of ocean blue (salty air often inspires me to bad poetry).
Exploring more of the park, we found the disappointment.
Because the nearby Coast Guard station was practice firing at mammoths or rocks or women with children who make fun of film photographers, the trail we had planned on hiking to another lighthouse and other coastal goodies and oddities was closed with a strip of yellow crime scene tape.
Undeterred, but a bit perturbed, I drove around some more until we found what I believed would be a corridor to the sun, sand and surf.
We found all three.
Walking down a pathway and over some dunes, we came out on a wide, wide strip of sand that stretches north for 30 miles – supposedly the longest continuous sand beach in the U.S., or so says the guidebook.
Unlike at Myrtle Beach, there were no sunburned sunbathers, no shells and no swimming.
According to the travel tome, the “treacherous currents,” chilly water and heavy surf make taking a dip unwise and forbidden.
The warnings, however, didn’t stop us from dipping a finger in the foam, poking through the piles of driftwood and scattering a flock of seagulls – the birds, not the ‘80s group with the bad hair.
It was, as the same guidebook writer proclaimed, “exhilarating.”
Chilled and thrilled, we retraced our tire tracks, which included passage across the impressive, but slightly oppressive, Astoria-Megler Bridge, another exhilarating experience considering the span’s 4.1-mile traverse over open water.
As we crossed between Washington and Oregon real estate, I kept trying to remember that “Dateline” episode about how to escape your sinking rental car when it plummets off the Astoria-Megler Bridge while you’re concentrating too hard on what to do when your rental car plunges off the bridge.
Fortunately, we made it to land without me having to choose between rolling the window down before I hit the bottom or after I had drowned.
We had plenty of time to rehearse our escape plan during a hearty Mexican dinner and another enchanted evening next to bonfire Bob.
He didn’t kill us that night either, and—for this I’m equally grateful—neither did the enchiladas, and we said so long to our little cabin in the big woods.
It was time for Jeff and all his kin to load up the truck and move to the city – Seattle that is, Starbucks and Space Needles, crazy scarf guy and grunge music. We’d find them all and more as we dropped the rental at the airport, jumped on a city bus and immersed ourselves in a quirky quagmire of mackerel-tossing merchants, elevator toilets and homeless men in pizza hats.
Ya’ll come back now; ya hear!
Jeffrey Simmons can be reached at 1-800-655-1406 or .