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.