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.
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.
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.
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