Mt. Ranier
The next morning we broke camp and headed West to Mt. Ranier NP. There are many, many great pictures of this place, so instead of putting up our merely good ones, I decided to try and show something of the scale of it. I think this is a shot of Mt. Ranier when we first were able to identify it in the distance--
Then we drove awhile until cresting a 'hill' and getting this view--
We drove some more, and saw it again...
On the way, we noticed what we now recognized as an "avalanche chute"...
A few minutes/miles later, we looked down and to our left to see the chute again:
It seems odd now, how the scale of objects in our lives kept changing back then. At this point in the trip we had been living in and around our vehicle for almost two weeks. Our living room was the truck cab. The rest of our home was mounted in the truck bed. We ate, slept, toileted, conversed, sang, prayed, farted, complained... all inside a (moving) eleven foot radius. Meanwhile, distant views rolled past like a movie. The daily scenery, majestic as it was, became background for our new 'normal' inside the truck. Living right at each others' elbows became comfortably *normal*. The space we shared with non-family members became enlarged, while our personal family space became compressed. We were mainly interacting with ourselves. Then, time for us was different somehow than it was for the rest of the world, and different than it is for us now. It was mystical.
As the mountain was growing closer and larger...
...we were growing closer and smaller.
In the final photo we took of Mt. Ranier:
... you can easily see a waterfall in the center of the picture. It is discernible in the previous picture as well, except it is not obviously a waterfall. We knew it was a waterfall because we watched the moving water with our binoculars. So the pictures for us have extra meaning that was inserted after they were taken.
We also knew there must have been people on the mountain. As we drove past the lodge and back down the park road, people were streaming at us from both directions. They were leaving their cars with backpacks, hiking boots, gaiters, and anticipation, and also leaving the slope with similar equipment but different expressions.
We searched and searched but never saw any actual hikers on the mountain. We felt certain they must have been there, only that they were obscured by the immensity of Mt. Ranier.
We were also losing sight of our normal life back home. Our problems, jobs, responsibilities, schedules, friends, escaped our notice. We knew they were all waiting for us, just obscured by the immensity of the trip.
You can calculate that any one day of the loop was less than four percent of the aggregate experience. No single thing we saw during the loop seemed to stand out as "best". It was all just part of our journey together.
When I think what meant most to me, I have to say, "Edna's smile." That was the most important thing. I realized that I really liked being really close to Edna and Robert.
