May 19th - Mt Ranier

This morning I went to Walmart to get a prescription refilled. On the way back I snapped the photos below. It is quite interesting how people level off an area on the side of a hill and build houses. The spots you see, half way up the hillside, are homes.

 The white hump in the center of the photo below is Mt. Ranier. It is about 70 miles from where I took the photo.

We decided to go take a closer look at Mt Ranier today. That required retracing about 70 miles of what we drove yesterday, but we figured it was worth it because the scenery is breathtaking. We stopped along the road and I took a photo of the road ahead. The "line" across the photo is the road as it goes across the face of the "mountainside".

 This is a photo of the the slope over the side of the guard rail. Note the pattern of the pine trees near the top of the photo.

 The photo below is also over the side of the guardrail but shows what is above the previous photo. You can match them with the pine trees.

 This is back down the road. Again the "scar" across the slope is the road.

 This is looking back, just over the guard rail. The light spot, a little above the center of the photo, is a lake.

This photo is looking up the hillside.

 We stopped further down the road and Kathy took this photo of Mt. Ranier. We were still about 25 miles from it.

 Just a photo of the beautiful scenery.

 We did photo taking exchanges with another couple who were at the Scenic Outlook. We used their camera and took photos of them and they used our phone and took a photo of us.

 This is Dog Lake. It is still mostly covered with ice and snow.

 Up next to the shore, where the ice had melted, I took this photo looking down at the lake bottom. The water appeared to be 15-18" deep.

 This was a pretty waterfall that we saw from another scenic outlook. I walked along the edge of the cliff, there was guardrail, for maybe a quarter mile and could never see the bottom of the waterfall.

 At the end of the quarter mile I could look down and see the stream that carried the water from the waterfall. Yes, it was a LONG way down.

 From the same point that I took the photo above I took the one below. The white "bar" on the face of the hillside is actually a semi driving down the road.

 When I drove through this tunnel yesterday in the RV it was SCARY! It was plenty large enough to get through but as soon as we entered the tunnel it was so dark that I could not see. Park of the reason is because there is no lighting in the tunnel. I think it is doubly bad because it is so bright outside the tunnel that my eyes couldn't react to the dark tunnel quick enough. Fortunately the tunnel is short and you can "aim" for the outlet while hoping that you are staying on your side of the road but not so far over that you will scrape the side.

 We stopped for lunch at Rose's. We had a good lunch here.

Back to the main reason for the drive, seeing Mt. Ranier up close. After a 65 mile drive, back along the way we came yesterday, we turned off on another highway to go to the mountain. After 5 miles up that road was closed. We aren't sure why. We knew that one of the passes in the area was still closed, because of snow. That information was posted at several places we had been. We had seen nothing that even gave us a clue that we could not get to the base of the mountain. We aren't sure if it was because the snow was still to deep to clear or, more likely, the parks people just didn't want to open the area until more people were around to use the road. It was still a good trip.

There were a couple of side benefits to the trip. First, it seemed like our CR-V was again getting great mileage. I reset things on the way up to the pass. We drove over through the pass and partway down the back side. When we got back to the point were I reset things, so we went equally up hill and down hill, we had travelled 54 miles. According to the fuel economy instrumentation we had averaged 29.4 mpg. The other benefit was to learn about the grades on the east side of the pass. I had tried to find some information on the grades leading up to the pass. I could find nothing. When going downhill today there were signs posting the grades. The grade for 12 of the first 14 miles down from the past was 6%. The other two miles were not quite that steep. For those of you who are familiar with the Monteagle grades near Chatanooga, TN they are 4-6%.

It the evening we drove around Yakima a little. If I remember tomorrow I will post a couple of photos of an area of the downtown where "storefronts" have been built on the sides of railroad box cars. The area was, of course, next to the main railroad line that still goes through the downtown. Down at the end of the area there was a day care center in a converted rail passenger car.

Good night to all and may God bless you and yours.