Month: August 2010

Rainier is a formidable mountain, its towering peaks and its imposing glaciers nothing short of awe-inspiring, which makes it all the more remarkable that it’s often the fragile beauty that leaves the most immediate impression on you during a late summer visit.

My personal favorite would have to be Indian Paintbrush in all it’s vivid incarnations,

but it’s equally impossible to ignore waves of purple flowers cascading down steep rocky cliffs.

How can anything as delicate as the small butterflies one sees everywhere find sustenance here

or endure long, bitter winters.

One can’t help but feel sympathy for chipmunks that seem to savor the plentiful flowers

but are forced to forage for food in the snow for at least half the year.

As noted previously, I don’t expect to be able to actually convey Mt Rainier to my readers, but I would be remiss if I didn’t try to capture some sense of the scale of the mountain, a sense that is immediately transmitted to anyone who starts out to hike by their legs.

The trail behind the lodge begins here, and it doesn’t take long before you realize just how high this mountain really is even at here below tree line. The trail is not for the faint-of-heart, as this beginning stretch clearly announces.

Once you reach the first ridge line, all it takes is a quick glance up to realize that you’ve really just begun to climb,

and a quick glimpse across the valley shows just how formidable this mountain really is,

dwarfing those who hike it,

like this unknown hiker in the valley below as seen through my telephoto lens.

Last Friday we took Leslie’s brother and sister-in-law to see Mt Rainier for the first time, and I performed my, nearly, annual attempt to accomplish the impossible, to capture the majesty of this mountain through a camera lens, a telephoto lens at that.

Here’s our first real glimpse of the mountain as we approached Sunrise, Leslie’s favorite approach to the mountain

because it gives her the feeling of being on the mountain, or at least the feeling that you’re always in the mountain’s presence:

Even though I prefer the more traditional southwestern approach from Paradise Park, I don’t mind starting from the northeast side and circling the mountain to get shots from several different angles,

though I found it rather disorienting seeing the mountain from so many different angles.

as I’m not used to wondering which way is north and which south?

Of course all these look better on my large Cinema screen, but the real frustration is in trying to get correct exposure for the whole photograph, and trying to photomerge shots where the exposure is different.

I’m going to have to drag my tripod to the top of the mountain and shoot some shots with High Dynamic Pro so I can get the best possible exposure in the snow and the trees even though I have no illusion that you can ever capture anything as magnificent as Mt. Rainier on the page.

No, all I really hope to do is drop crumbs that will lead you to your own experience of the mountain.