After about a year of planning to hike together, fellow nwhiker and hike-a-thoner Janelle and I finally made it happen. The destination was obvious – our beloved Mount Rainier.

Janelle hikes more on that mountain than anyone I know, and like me, she never gets sick of it. We keep returning to the same places over and over again, but it never feels the same.

This time, it felt cold. Really really cold. (This seems to be the general theme of my trip reports lately, especially since I missed out on the latest inversion.)

We climbed up to Mazama Ridge just as the mountain decided to hide behind a curtain of clouds. We sat down for an early lunch and briefly considered just going home. But then, ooh! aah! magic started happening!

The mountain reappeared, and at the same it started snowing perfect, tiny snowflakes, like someone was sprinkling glitter all over us.

Buoyed by the beauty, we abandoned all thoughts of leaving. In fact, it turned into one of those ‘we don’t wanna leave’ days.

Luckily we could feel our toes again now that we were moving, so we were able to hang out in Paradise the rest of the day.

Janelle is usually quite the early bird, so I was pretty pleased with myself when I influenced her to try a more Ingunnesque schedule – staying for sunset.

She seemed to enjoy it.

This was definitely one of my favorite winter trips to Mount Rainier – I can’t imagine a better way to bond with a new friend.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Hiking, Mount Rainier. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.