Monday, June 15 – Day 2 Training

I Saw the Mountain!

Bright sunshine bleeding through the white canvas wrangled me from sleep this morning. The heavy clouds still cover Mt. Rainier's peak from my camera's viewfinder. I have hopes of seeing the peak later this week. I hear some visitors never see the peak during their visits to the park.
After breakfast and lunch, I stopped holding my breath. The peak revealed itself and displayed all of its glory. What a magnificent sight!

We spent the day busily completing the schedule of lectures, orientations, and introductions. I learned about exciting Leave No Trace policies and things like how it takes 1 million years for glass to degrade, compared to the 1-5 years for cigarette butts and leather. Surprisingly, it takes something around 50 years for aluminum or tin to biodegrade.

After the lectures and formalities of the day, it was time to have a little bit of fun! We all loaded up into the cargo van and headed for Paradise. No, not the figurative paradise that we imagine, but the literal, a place here at the park called Paradise. What a wonderful place. In the warmer months (June isn't really all that warm here yet), the meadows are covered with heather and avalanche lilies. Right now, there is still a thick layer of snow several feet thick, suitable for summer tubing and skiing. We all spent less than an hour total in Paradise. The trip was just long enough to watch a lovely video at the Visitor's Center. I would highly recommend watching it anytime you are up here at Mt. Rainier.

After our trip to Paradise, it was time for dinner and another lecture was indeed scheduled for the evening. I had the most exciting pleasure of seeing a great friend from my training out in Wyoming for my Wilderness EMT certification. Caitlin, a back country ranger out here at Mt. Rainier, stopped by the community building! It was awesome to see her again and even more awesome to know we were both enjoying such a cool park! We took some time to catch up on our lives since we departed Lander back in May. We are both doing very awesome things for the next few months. For the remainder of the week, it looks like there is a possibility for Ultimate Frisbee on Thursday! Tuesday is out, since there is a scheduled movie night featuring a viewing of “Touching the Void.” Wednesday is a CPR class. The CPR class is a bit of a mute point since it's not CPR for the professional rescuer, the class is mostly useless for me. I just had my CPR training in January and EMT training in April. CPR is still pretty fresh in my mind.

There is talk of a group run around the Longmire area in the range of 5 miles or less. I'm not sure if I'll be able to make the full 5 miles, but I'll happily try for something like 1.5 miles and then turn around.

Now, for a tasty dinner of chicken mole and an evening session to discuss SCA and all of its wonderful benefits!