Pacific Crest Trail - Day 171 - Mt. Rainier National Park

Start: 2308.1 - Snow Lake
End: Mt. Rainier National Park - Deer Creek Backcountry Campground

I have zero idea what this life form is but it’s pretty incredible. I want to describe it in the context of laundry detergent or the logo of a car wash or something along those lines, which is a strange realization in the wilderness - almost as if the context of my life being divorced enough from nature to default to thinking about cleaning chemicals and advertisements for concrete bays designed to power wash heaps of aluminum and steel powered by long dead plants and dinosaurs while attempting to describe an organism in front of me dozens of miles into the wilderness feels… a bit off. Maybe more on that sooner than later.

It is incredible having a device in my pocket capable of capturing the holistic and detailed of these expanses we’re walking through which also allows me to wirelessly transmit images and thoughts to an interested (or perhaps rubbernecking) audience independent of geography.

Technology should aim to seamlessly and optionally enable us to appreciate, share, and learn about nature, not intrude on it (cars), abstract and obfuscate it (television), or separate us from it / allow us to exploit it (nearly everything ever invented).

Crisp cold clear clean water flowing down through a beautiful creek.

Is there anything more “valuable”? I would argue no.

ROYGBIV without the Violet. And maybe a Sky Blue replacing the Indigo.

Looking back at Mt. Adams looming over Goat Rocks Wilderness.

It was approximately here that I had one bar of 5G service that enabled me to call Mt. Rainier National Park to attempt to book a backcountry wilderness campsite ~14 miles ahead for the night for myself, Kristin, and two european PCT hikers who also decided to take a detour through Mt. Rainier National Park.

After a fairly lengthy phone conversation with Rose at Longmire Ranger Station, I was able to secure a reservation for a backcountry wilderness campsite for 4 for $46, which amounted to $10 per person per night, and a $6 reservation fee.

It’s funny - I effectively paid $10 per person for 4 people to be able to take a shit in an unwalled box, because it’s not like we couldn’t have pitched our tents anywhere we wanted. I‘m going to go out on a limb and suggest that you probably expect more for $10 from your government than a box in some bushes to take a shit in, but I‘ve probably just been out in the wilderness too long - maybe that’s standard now. Do we have to pay $10 a person every time the military wants to scramble a jet? It’s $2.50 per person per missile? Oh, ok, cool cool cool. Let‘s maybe have a bake sale.

We have a very simple system of collecting money from citizens for government purposes. It’s commonly referred to as taxation. That in our microtransaction based wasteland of an economy people don’t understand that paying for backcountry permits effectively amounts to paying to enter public property that you already own and are taxed on is beyond me. I simply do not understand. Let’s have AI generate barcodes from the trees we see around us and bill us accordingly for a viewing experience. Why the fuck not? We can even wear our favorite fall sweaters for the ‘gram and ‘tok while we’re at it.

So anyway, Mt. Rainier is gorgeous.

The Laughingwater Creek trail is a connector to the PCT from a remote part of Mt. Rainier National Park. It was not exactly “clear” towards the top. It’s pretty funny making it through a challenging obstacle course to be able to turn around and laugh at someone behind you making their way through… wait is this the trail or academia?

An awesome and vacant ranger cabin.

Incredible chicken of the woods mushrooms. Ok, back to being a fungi blog.

This little inchworm joined us for lunch. He had feet on only the front and back of his body. We didn’t name him, but in retrospect, his name was probably “Inchy”. It’s French.

I’m having a post-traumatic stress response looking at these signs. ”7.1 miles” took us nearly 4 hours, on top of the 4 hours it took us to go ”6.8 miles“ down to this point. Maybe Mt. Rainier is a time vortex. Maybe it’s time to use things like GPS to publish trail distances.

These logs with entire tiny forests on them are my favorite.

I almost died here while attempting to collect water from the stream. I stepped on a dry looking rock that was slicker than ice and nearly fell backwards over a 10 ft waterfall. 😅

Did you know they harvest these mushrooms for that stylish asbestos based popcorn ceiling everyone loves?

Parting of the trees!

One of those swimming holes you never tell anyone about, ever. 🔪

The amenities at our backcountry campsite. Dirt. A coat hanger quality critter hanging post (irrelevant because we are mandated to carry bear proof food containers). An unwalled shit box on a pallet. $10 per person, please and thank you.