The Mountains at the End of America

This was a huge, beautiful drive across brand new country, from one national park to another. We started early. At seven in the morning Paradise was bathed in sunshine. The mountain shone. All the cloud was beneath us.

Pausing only to grab a coffee, we set off, winding our way back down through the forests, through the cloud and finally out of the park. Once we'd got away from the mountain, the sunshine returned and we drove on through a beautiful morning. It was still early when we stopped for gas at White Pass, a tiny, scattered human settlement entirely dwarfed by the distant peaks that reared up on either side of a broad flat valley. Living here must be like seeing everything through a wide-angle lens.

Back in the car, highway 12 took us east. Suddenly there was a huge body of water on our right, lit by the horizontal sunshine. We didn't know it then, but it has the wonderful name of Rimrock Lake. At the time it was new and nameless in the morning sun, as if just the act of driving towards it had called it into being. We had to stop and stare at it.

If this had been a three or four day drive we could have gone on like this, stopping every thirty miles - but we had to be in Glacier that night. We got back in the car, back on the road, chewed up the miles.

The road climbed up out of the valley. The mountains turned to cliffs. We came over a rise and found ourselves in a yellow desert of sage that stretched ahead of us. Gradually it blended into farmland. Washington grows 60% of the apples consumed in America and we were driving through the heart of it, all the way to Spokane.

For the first time since we had bought it, many years before, we actually used a book describing various long-distance US road trips to tell us where we should stop for lunch. The answer turned out to be Frank's Diner in Spokane, just a few blocks from the interstate. For the last ninety years or so it has been housed inside an old pullman carriage, on a busy corner just below the actual railway line. We were intrigued but not especially confident, but there was a reassuringly long line for tables that turned out to mean only a twenty minute wait.

We were eventually shown to bar stool seats looking straight into the galley kitchen where Josh and Nelson gracefully and silently danced around each other in order to cook all the food. It was simple breakfast food, mainly eggs and bacon, with good coffee that kept coming. Laura had the corn beef hash, Chris had a turkey sandwich, William and I had eggs florentine with hash browns. It was all excellent. In fact, it was one of the best meals I'd had in America, and the hash browns were exceptional.

I'd have gladly stayed for dinner, but there were still all those miles ahead of us. On we went, into the afternoon, letting the rest of Washington play out around us. On into Idaho, a mere seventy miles wide at this point. A vast cloud of dark rain lowered far off on our right. We could see the lightning flashing within it, but the rain remained a vaporous curtain on the horizon and never reached us. The road climbed, more mountains ahead, and then spun about to the right and dipped, plunging into Montana.

If there was one place this trip that I wish we had stopped to photograph, it would be this next section of the drive. Turning off the main highway and heading north we found ourselves passing through a golden landscape of great rolling plains, rising to gentle peaks to either side, the grass glowing yellow in the westering sun. Everything blazed under a perfect sky. Far ahead of us we could see more mountains and I was thinking of our eventual destination, Glacier National Park, on the border with Canada. But we were still hours and hundreds of miles away. There would be mountains behind the mountains we could see, but we didn't know that yet.

On we went, now driving along the edge of Flathead Lake, 30 miles long and 16 miles wide. Although it's freshwater it looks like a small sea, the dark blue surface alive with boats, the shores crinkled with marinas and jetties. We left the lake behind and were back into farmland hemmed in by more mountains, punctuated by tiny towns, or ranches with brassy billboards exhorting adherence to the ten commandments.

Sometime close to seven in the evening (Mountain Time) we made it past the Montana Vortex and House of Mystery and stopped int Hungry Horse, MT for gas and a huckleberry milkshake. I don't think I knew they were a real thing, but up here they are inescapable. Later on, we'd be told that no one had worked out how to grow them domestically, and that anyone who did would be some sort of saint in Montana.

Refuelled, we made our final leg of the day: driving into Glacier itself and through to the eastern side where we would be staying. Only 54 miles, but nearly another two hours behind the wheel. On our right, through the pine trees, was Lake McDonald. Ahead of us rose the indomitable peaks of Glacier, the mountains at the end of America.

After Rainier there was something unforgiving, perhaps even cruel about them: a jagged range of brown rock, like broken teeth. To reach our cabin we would need to drive up and through them, along the Going-to-the-Sun Road. Built in the 1920s to facilitate automobile travel across the centre of the park this is, depending on your point of view, either a triumph of civil engineering or a vertiginous nightmare. At the highest point, Logan Pass, a mere 6647 feet up, we climbed out and watched the mountain tops painted red by the sunset.

By the time we made it down the other side to Rising Sun, on the shores of St Mary Lake, the night was black around us and the stars were glinting in above our heads, seemingly closer than ever.

Paradise, WA to Rising Sun, MT

Miles: 606
States: 3
Licence Plates: zero. Inexplicably we didn't see anything new.
Brunch: Frank's Diner, Spokane, WA
Dinner: Two Dog Flats, Rising Sun, MT

Marmots in the Mist

Presumably, on a clear day, the views of Rainier from that path are extraordinary. We may never know. We had a good walk anyway. The cloud was (ha!) atmospheric, and the trees and flowers were still beautiful. The top of the path wound across a flat heathland populated by a huge number of friendly marmots. They bounded around, something like a beaver crossed with a rabbit, eating the flowers and staring ambivalently at any passing humans. Occasionally one would sit up on its back legs and fire a piercing screech through the mist. If anyone urgently needs two hundred photographs of marmots, please get in touch.

After the Wisconsin Disaster

We shan’t dwell on the details of the incident that has become known as the Wisconsin Disaster. Suffice to say that practitioners of the Licence Plate game divide into Purists and Pragmatists and, momentarily, the Purists took charge. The question was, does a licence plate spotted on foot count, or does it need to be seen from the car? Ten minutes later we had abandoned a perfectly good parking spot and were scattered across the cloud-wreathed mountainside car parks of Paradise, without phones or signal, and with visibility at ten metres. It’s safe to say that the Pragmatists will be making the decisions for the rest of recorded time.

The resulting Board of Inquiry made several recommendations, the most significant of which was that, given the heavy and increasing cloud at Paradise, we should give up on our planned walk and head instead back over to Sunrise where we had been the day before. It was a drive, but it should sunnier there – at the very least we should get a view of the peak.

We found the car and set off down the mountain. Just like yesterday, the cloud permeated the forest, tendrils of vapour curled above the road. Then, also just like yesterday, we turned the magic corner and the curtain was drawn, the sky went blue, and the sun blazed merrily.

As we approached the gate back into the park we encountered traffic – we slowed. Was this a bear jam? We crawled forwards, excited…

No. A ranger stationed at the roadside was warning each in-bound car that there was a two hour queue to enter the park. In fact, it was one car out, one car in. Turning around meant another hour and a half drive back to Paradise and, presumably, a similar wait at that entrance too – not to mention the danger that even then we wouldn’t be able to park. We decided to stick it out. Almost immediately our luck began to change.

First, a scruffy green campervan came the other way sporting a dusty, miraculous Hawaii plate. Then the queue began to move. Suddenly we were back into the park and carving our way around the switchbacks on the way up to Sunrise.

As we reached the top, it happened. The road runs straight along the ridge from the last turn to the parking lot of the visitors’ centre. On the right, the land rises steeply, thick with pine trees, to the top of the ridge. On the left, the slope is gentler, with intermittent clumps of trees separated by thick pale grass. At almost the same instant, both William and Laura shouted ‘Bear!’.

I hadn’t seen it and we were already well past. A moment later we reached the car park and turned around, pulling over maybe a quarter of a mile back down the road. We piled out, grabbing the camera. There were bears. Black bears, a mother and cub, cinnamon-backed, making their way through the trees parallel to the road, at least fifty metres away. We stopped. We gawped.

 A pair of cyclists we had overtaken twenty minutes before pulled up. A car stopped behind ours and a woman climbed out. What had we seen, they asked. We had started a Bear Jam.

The mother moved in stately procession, her shoulders making mountains of her brown fur as she paced ahead. The cub frolicked and bounced behind her, bounding delightfully through the grass. Laura laughed with glee, as happy as I’ve ever seen her. The woman from the car sighed with satisfaction; she had been a Ranger at Mt St Helens for six years she told us, and she had never seen a bear before. We didn’t mention the Bear Woman of Minneapolis from the day before.

The bears moved off out of sight. We got back in the car and forgot about Sunrise. We drove back to Paradise, got waved through the line, and parked right in front of the inn. The cloud hadn’t lifted, in fact it was probably worse. We did the walk we had originally planned anyway and it was fine, everything was fine. 

Paradise, WA to Sunrise, WA and back, again.

Miles: Just a smidge higher than yesterday - say, 109?

States: 1

Licence Plates: 4 (total now 47, we're missing Mississippi, Kansas, Kentucky, and D.C.)

Breakfast and Dinner (we didn't need lunch): Paradise Inn, Paradise, WA.

Number of Wisconsin licence plates ironically spotted in the immediate wake of the Wisconsin Disaster: 3.

Attack of the Bear Woman

Laura wants to see a bear. It's her default setting. Any time, any place, but especially so in National Parks which we may or may not have visited for this exact purpose. Most visitors don't ever see one. We didn't in the Great Smoky Mountains, or in the Rockies. But we got very lucky in Yellowstone, in every sense, when we saw a grizzly at great distance and came rather too close to a black bear with her cubs.

So, Laura has seen bears. Box ticked.

And now we are in Mt Rainier, with Glacier and Yellowstone on the itinerary. All home to bears. The box can and will be ticked again, and again. Laura wants to see a bear.

On the first of two full days in Mt Rainier NP so far we had not seen a bear. But boy were we about to hear about them.

We had driven across to the eastern side of the park to a place called Sunrise. The cloud above Paradise had thickened and descended overnight, obliterating the mountain peak and pressing through the trees around the inn. Dramatic and beautiful, but not excellent for walking; fifty miles away, in Sunrise, fifty miles away, things were supposed to be different.

Getting there meant a long slow drive back down all the switchbacks, this time with minimal visibility. The cloud filled everything, masking the forest and valleys below as well as the peaks above so that all was white apart from us and the next ten metres of road. Slowly we crept under the bottom edge of the cloud so that it seemed to hover just above us. Then, about halfway through the hour and a half journey, we turned a long steep corner and suddenly, like the parting of a curtain, the road ahead was completely clear, the sky was blue and the sun shone.

Sunrise is higher than Paradise, 6400 feet above sea level, and the highest point of Mt Rainier that can be reached by car. We walked from there up a steep trail, and eventually, with some huffing and puffing, made it to the top of Second Burroughs Mountain, another 1000 feet higher again.

Here we were well above the treeline, on a broad flat expanse of tundra, the wind in our faces. Right in front of us loomed the top of Mount Rainier itself, huger and nearer than ever, the ice shining white in the sunshine, fading to blue in the shadows. We stood and gawped. And that was when the bear woman appeared.

So often on this trip we've been reminded of the wonderful kindness and friendliness of total strangers. It happens in the UK, but not like this. People we've chanced upon have given us useful information, or just shot the breeze when they didn't have to. Occasionally there were astonishing acts of generosity. We weren't surprised to find ourselves in a rolling conversation with all of the other people that were on Burroughs Mountain, either stopping for a rest like us, or passing through.

The bear woman was part of a lovely family from Minneapolis. They stopped and we discussed their trip and ours, and others on the mountain chipped in too. She was slightly ursine herself with glossy dark pelt hair and pointed and painted bright red nails. Talk quickly turned to bears, because, well, all the seeing of bears had been done apparently. By her.

She had seen a mother and two cubs yesterday down by the pond which we had passed on our way up the mountain. She had seen the same ones, or possibly different ones, further off before that. Whenever she went to Glacier she saw grizzlies. Back home, she had a brown bear which came into her yard.

All we could do was admire her luck and her enthusiasm and go on our way, hoping that we might see one ourselves. The track led down the other side of the ridge, through more forests and meadows and marmots and chipmunks. It was beautiful. Whisps of cloud tangled themselves across the mountain above us. Lakes shone bright blue amongst the trees.

We saw no bears.


Paradise, WA, to Sunrise, WA and back.

Miles: 102
States: 1

Licene Plates: 18

Total: 43

Breakfast: Paradise Inn, Paradise, WA
Lunch: Sunrise, WA
Dinner: Paradise Inn, Paradise, WA

Favourite Place Name: Ohanapecosh (for best results imagine it being said by a parrot doing a Jimmy Stewart impression)

Up and Away

Here are two facts about Snoqualmie Falls, WA.

1) It's on the way to Mt Rainier.
2) It's where they filmed Twin Peaks.

But are either of these facts true?

Well, as for fact number one, no. If you were in a hurry, say you were a cynical wise-cracking Seattle police detective rushing up into the mountains to defuse an environmental bomb planted deep inside your local National Park, you would not go anywhere near Snoqualmie. If you were on holiday and just trying to get there for lunch, you would not let the waterfall from that weird David Lynch show lure you into a substantial detour.

But we had all day to reach Paradise, so why not have everyone indulge me in a side trip to Lynchian Purgatory first?

It wasn't until we were packing to leave Seattle that I realised that the locations for Twin Peaks must be close by. I'm basically the only one in the family that had watched it and I'm certainly the only one that enjoyed it (Laura threw up her hands when the dwarf first showed up and never went back - fair enough). As a '90s teen the show was a bewildering and enthralling must-watch, and I had been entirely hooked. When the show returned in 2017 for another 18 episodes of obtuse auteurism, I lapped it up all over again.

A quick search told me that various Washington towns had been used for filming and that the closest, Snoqualmie, was home to both the hypnotic waterfall and the Great Northern Hotel perched alongside, which appear in the title sequence.

So, no Sherrif's office, no diner, or gas station, but still, easily reachable and almost, basically, sort of, on our way.

Picking up the car was easy and quick. We corkscrewed out of Seattle, and out through the suburbs to the interstate, back on the road, curling uphill away from the coast. Thick dark trees on either side whooshing past. Overtaking huge timber-laden trucks. New but familiar.

Then we got to Snoqualmie. It's not even remotely like Twin Peaks. I've never seen a town look so neat, so respectable. The buildings are well-maintained. The kerbs are freshly painted, the hydrants gleam. The grass on every verge, every median, looks like a putting green. There's a convenient, and free, car-park across the road from the hotel, and a smart wooden footbridge that takes you to an outlook over the falls. In August they boast a handsome but modest flow. They're charming, but nothing like the dangerous, elemental roar one sees on TV. The path was busy, but not crazily so. There were a couple of young families and two coach-loads of silver-haired mid-westerners on a tour. An interminable series of highly-detailed panels recounted the history of hydro-electric energy in Snoqualmie over the last century and a half. There was no mention at all of Twin Peaks.

It's entirely possible I was the only one there that had watched it. Or had I wandered into another reality altogether? One where the show had never existed, and this was just a completely respectable, clean-cut, Washington town with a picturesque waterfall. Nothing bad or mysterious could happen here, there were no dark secrets... How very Lynchian.

We bought a magnet in the gift shop, and discovered that they sold key fobs stamped 315 (Dale Cooper's room, of course, at the Great Northern Hotel), for $10. I was almost tempted, but perhaps it was enough just to have it confirmed that the show had indeed existed after all.

We went back the way we came, stopping at the Safeway to buy ourselves some lunch, and drove down the western side of the park through small towns and rolling farmland. Every so often the mountain would peep out from behind a tree, or appear around a bend, slightly larger each time: a massive great dollop of rock, rounded with ice and snow.

The towns petered out, the farms turned to trees, the road climbed. Once inside the park the mountains were around us, the distant slopes covered by a clinging moss of dark green forest. With every corner the road either swung slowly around a great shoulder of rock or snapped back immediately on itself, splashed by a cascade of water as it leapt down the mountainside.

At 5600 feet we stopped. We had reached the Paradise Inn.

We unloaded and checked in. There was Rainier, still above us. There was still time for a short walk before dinner, so we set off down a path towards a lookout offering a view of the Nisqually glacier, one of the many that drape the higher slopes of the mountain. The pine needles shone in the afternoon sun, the meadows blazed with bright alpine flowers. The chipmunks and the marmots skittered and blinked at us respectively. At the end of the path we stared up and there was the bottom of the glacier, just visible beneath a bank of thick cloud that had settled across the mountaintop: a stretch of ice dirty-white against the bare rose-brown rock, impossibly out of reach.


Seattle, WA to Paradise, WA, via Snoqualmie, WA and Twin Peaks, WTF

Miles: 137
States: 1
Licence Plates: 25 - a strong start.
Breakfast: Doughnuts foraged by Laura and Chris from General Porpoise and Top Pop, Seattle, WA.
Lunch: sandwiches on the road.
Dinner: Paradise Inn, Paradise, WA
Favourite place name: there's a smaller mountain inside the park called Mt. Wow.

Revisiting Childhood with Seattle on the Side

Quick note: my dear ol' Pop has told you plenty of what we've done in Seattle, but he did miss out the most important thing, me!!! (Woo!), so sorry if I leave out the daily agenda, I'm going through a bit of an identity crisis. Who isn't though?

We landed in Seattle on Saturday an hour and a half after we left and, unlike 4 years ago, I seem to have tossed my internal clock into a blender and now I'm leaking temporal gunk all over Seattle.  So far this seems to be very much the trend of the trip: strikingly similar but also somehow super different. Whether it be the titanic portions which are now herculean tasks or simply my personal highlights¹, everything has felt off for lack of a better word, like the mirror universe in Star Trek, if that helps. It's begun to make me wonder if perhaps the America I remember living in is some romanticised dream of the country it could be. 

~FLASHBACK NOISES~FLASHBACK NOISES~

Growing up in America, and Obama's America at that, I was sheltered from the devisiveness of this nation (I mean come on, my biggest issue was not being able to get to the ice cream shop by myself) and that has led me to be a staunch defender of the Good ol' US of A to all the Brits who see it as some form of liberty-addicted Mad Max Apocalypse. I always thought it was chronic cynicism desperate to focus on the failings of its gung-ho kid to avoid having to come to terms with its own failings². 

And whilst that's definitely at least a bit true, I'm back here in one of the most pridefully liberal cities I've ever visited³ and I'm finding myself getting distracted by the small things like the super-sized servings and alcohol possession laws, completely ignoring the actual hot topics like gun legislation and police brutality, let alone all the positives of this Oxford-of-America. (The composting and normalised lgbtq+ inclusivity for starters).

When I read through the blog of our transnational trip nearly a decade ago, I discovered that six year old me's favourite thing was an evolution exhibition in a museum. I forgot I used to be the science kid who would go round the table asking everyone what their favourite dinosaur was. Today the question is much more likely to be on the 2020 democratic nomination (prepare your answers!). I teared up today because I was on Air Force One. (Is jet lag an excuse?⁴).

Not to mention the fact that my favourite ice cream flavour is no longer fruit-based, I'm clearly a very different person to the kid who used 47 consecutive exclamatives in a row on his Yellowstone blog. (Look, see? I've only used six! Total!) And I think this has come up for me because of how close I am to a chapter of my life I thought finished and that's a little unsettling.

However Seattle's shown me the same kid inside: my jaw still goes slack at the sight of the NASA logo, and planes are just as cool as ever. On the blog 10 years ago (yep still 10 years) Mum mentioned wondering if I'll ever stop being the obnoxiously comfident one in crowds and much to many people's dismay that doesn't seem to be the case. Not to mention how ridiculously loud I am all the time. Chris will attest to that one I assure you.

I think a lot of this is surprisingly similar for the USA too. The train ride into Seattle was filled almost entirely with me pointing out all the school busses, Ford pickup trucks and the rest of quintessential America we drove past. There were so many Proustian Rushes it became more of a Proustian Tsunami.

So to summarise the USA: similar but also very different, and I appear to follow suit.

Not to mention the whole UK/USA frenemy shtick is as confusing as ever, even if they definitely have nicer skyscrapers.

Seattle is lovely by the way.

¹Definitely the adorable dogs and the owners who smile back, Air Force ONE. THE AIR FORCE ONE. AHHH. Oh and the Space Needle. Not at all terrifying. Nosiree.

²Admit you would see that film.

³pun intended.

⁴ Also pun intended. D'you know what? All the puns are intended, let's just set that up as standard. There'll be a lot of 'em.

Seattle

In the old days we'd have started on Central Time at least; arriving in Seattle from Britain has meant a lot of early mornings.

Out on the street at seven on the first morning, we went straight to the centre of things: the navel of the city, and perhaps the world, the first Starbucks coffee house at 1912 Pike Place, opposite the market. The line outside was smaller than it had been at St Peter's in Rome, but there was a similar sense of occasion amongst the faithful. Inside the experience is slick and courteous, and at the time I might have thought this was the nature of a corporate flagship. After a few more such interactions I realised that I had just forgotten what it feels like to be a customer in America. But there is something else to it as well.

All around Seattle the story is the same. The signage in that original Starbucks is hand-chalked, almost rustic, although still comfortably within the corporate template. Around Pioneer Square, the heart of the old town, you can see the first skyscraper to have been built west of the Mississippi, and walk along streets down which fell trees tumbled, on their way to the waterfront. In the Museum of Popular Culture they have Jimi Hendrix's diary and Kurt Cobain's smashed-up guitars. Enormous Alaska-bound cruise ships now dock at piers from which prospectors once set sail for the Klondike goldfields. Aside from Starbucks, this is the home of such plucky little start-ups as Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon. In Seattle, what starts out as indie, as rugged, or individual, has a habit of turning into runaway, corporate success.

For the most part, it seems that the city is at peace with this. The high-rise office towers gleam and smart-casual, ear-budded employees stride to their desks. A short boat trip around the sound reveals the industry of the port, with containers from China stacked up alongside grain silos that will be emptied, their contents exported to south-east Asia. Mass transit works brilliantly, with friendly and helpful staff aboard bus, light rail, and monorail. Everything is recycled, or composted, including plastics, and everyone, in every shop, restaurant, or museum, right down to the lanyarded police accountability officer who volunteered breakfast recommendations on the street this morning, has been utterly charming.

Maybe it helps that this is an irrepressibly progressive place. Everyone seems at ease with themselves, and with each other, and diversity and expressions of individuality seem to be genuinely celebrated rather than merely tolerated. From atop the Space Needle, the whole of Seattle shines.

Back on the ground, the tarnish is inescapable. Some of it, like the graffiti and the bubble gum wall, is playful.

But there is misery here too. The homelessness is worse here than anywhere else I've been. In the morning they are sleeping, in the parks, in doorways, under bridges; towards evening they haunt downtown and the tourist destinations. If there is a plan for them, it isn't working; if there's help available, they're not getting it.

For all that, this has been a pleasant place to spend a few days. Tomorrow, we leave behind the gleam and the grunge.

We're getting back on the road and heading a little south and east to visit the first of three National Parks, Mount Ranier.

Testing...