Among other reasons [g]:
This is why I live in the Pacific Northwest
Mt Rainier from the air
I took these while flying back home from visiting my mother in Texas week before last. It’s taken me over a week to get them off my camera and onto my computer.
As a good friend said to me last week, I need relief. She wasn’t talking about it in the usual sense, but in the topographical. As in relief lines, which become more numerous and closer together on the map the more rugged the terrain gets. Mt. Rainier is about as much relief as you can get south of Alaska. And it’s right in my backyard. So to speak.
When we had the terrible floods a few years ago that shut down Mt. Rainier National Park for six months because the roads had washed out in more places than you could count (the park permanently lost an entire campground to the raging Nisqually River, too), I drove up to the Nisqually entrance, where the rangers were leading guided walks a mile or two into the park. I made a comment to the ranger about needing to come up and see how “my mountain” was faring, and he told me that if he had a dollar for every time someone had said that to him since the floods, he’d be able to retire.
Seeing my mountain, whether it’s from the air like this, or from the east side of the Cascades north of Yakima, or my first glimpse of it heading north on I-5 from Portland, is the one sure sign I’m almost home after any trip. It’s always such a relief [g].