USA-The North-Western Volcano Tour

---

(Kriszti)
It was already September, when we arrived to Seattle after spending the rainiest month of our life in Alaska.
'No more rain, PLEASE!'- we kept whispering towards the sky and surprise, surprise, we saw the sun on the next morning!


The first couple of days we spent with finalizing our plans for the month and looking around in the city. After a quick Seattle citytour we left the crowds and began our journey.
As we started heading south, Mount Rainier, a beautiful 4200 meters tall mountain has siluetted out of the sky. It was shady, misty and seemed so huge that it looked like a big painting on the sky rather than a real mountain. Thousands of cars were passing by on the busy highway, but the picture of the mountain remained calm. 'Just wait, we will be coming closer soon!'


Our first destination was the Olympic National Park. It is full of old grown forrest with giant evergreens, some of them are around 300-500 years old. There are beautiful 3000 ms high mountains in the middle of the park too, plus a coastal area on the west side, so it is hard to be bored there.
We did some treks in all sections, but probably the best was the alpine area as the fall already painted great colors to the hills and open meadows. It was sunny and warm so we could enjoy camping and being outside all day again!


We have known a lot about Mt St Helens volcano already before we got there. It erupted in 1988 causing a significant damage to the surroundings, destroying thousand of acres of forrest, taking lives of hundreds of elks, bears and other animals and unfortunately, many humans too.
Well, from the Johnston Observatory it is still quite devastating to look around: there is nothing but ash and rocks around the mountain, which is still erupting! Of course with a very small scale compared to what it did in 1988, but smoke, steam and hard lava are coming out of the crater 24 hours a day.

Scientists learned a lot from this eruption and now they share it with the public in a simplified and very enjoyable way. We found ourselves spending more time in the visitor centers watching films, looking at exhibitions and listening to ranger talks then being outside, but actually we did not really hear a loud call of the wild here. We did a small walk and sit down watching the mountain, but fortunately this time it remained quiet.
Strange, how much humans like dangers...we heard that last time when scientists anticipated a possible eruption of St Helens about 4000 people gathered to the closest viewing platform to see the big bang live...it remained calm that time too.


Having learnt a lot about how dangerous volcanos can get and how quickly they can completely destroy everything around them, we hit the road to the next volcano, Mt Rainier. It is much quieter than St Helens but it is considered active.

This mountain looks like St Helens had looked before the eruption. It has a great symmetric shape, lots of glaciers and snow on the top, lively forests and meadows around at lower elevation. The weather was very stable and warm on the first couple of days, so we did some nice hikes. One of them was a great strenuous walk to Camp Muir, the most popular base camp for the summiters. We started early, said hello to a few elks on the meadows and enjoyed the view as the first sunshines touched the mountain. Great sunrise!
Th route went along big snow-fields, on which it was a great fun to glissade the way down. Some people used their bottoms :-). The camp itself had a great atmosphere, lots of climbers around, teams came down already from the summit, others were practicing glacier walking or rescuing techniques.
The next day we were so happy that we did the Muir hike a day before as it was misty, cloudy and windy, and remained like this for he next three days, so we broke our camp and spent the following nights in a cosy motel room. Wimps, aren't we? But the temptation to have a hot shower, a bed and a television is so high if the weather is bad...:-)

The cream on top of our Rainier days was the Mt Rainier Mountaineering Festival. The program was excellent, filled with presentations, Q&A sections with famous climbing gurus and senior mountain guides. One of them has just recently came back from serious Himalayan expeditions. It was great to listen to the presentations of Mt McKinley and the trek to the Everest Base Camp, the places we also visited. The best part was when Ed Viesturs, the famous 6 time Everest summiter talked about his life, his inspiration and motivation about climbing all the 8000 ms high mountains without supplemental oxygen. The Whittaker twin brothers were also there, very nice people and all of them started their professional mountaineering career at Mt Rainier. We ended up with handshakes, photos and books signed by the big guys.

It would be so sad if this volcano erupts some time in the future, destroys the beauties of this mountain and stops the next generation of climbers to enjoy this area.

I could not wait to see Yellowstone.
We had to travel about two days to get there. Gabor has been here before about 14 years ago, so he was excited to go back as he had great memories from that summer vacation. We were lucky to find a nice cosy motel room outside the parks at the north entrance in Gardiner and we went right into the park as we arrived, which was still very busy.
As we parked the car at the Mammoth visitor center we found ourselves in the middle of a big show. A bull elk was looking after his herd in the middle of the parking lot, desperately trying to keep them together. Of course, visitors were watching it from every angle and if they went too close to the animals, the rangers gave them a loud warning. This bull was a huge one and he was in a quite aggressive mood, he charged at people and cars if they were not really positioned well.
We managed to get back to our car with a big detour and explored the Mammoth springs area before the sun went down. What a smell...and what a colorful place. I was even more excited to see the rest of the park after this entree.

After sunset the bisons came out too and were razing on the freshly watered grass of the elegant Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel.

We decided to go for a day-hike on the next day. We walked up Mt Wasbourn and watched the scenery from a viewing tower. The Canyon village area was the closest to us so after the hike we drove there. The parking lot for the first viewing platform was almost full. 'So what is happening here?' - I asked Gabor. 'You will see in a minute.'- he replied.
Then I saw it. Wow! Yellow-orange-beige-pink-red-brown...the canyon looked like somebody had poured every color of paint from the ridge to the valley, gave a greenish color to the river running at the bottom and finished the job with inserting two great waterfalls to the picture, so that it will not be so boring :-).
What a natural masterpiece!
We stopped at every possible viewpoint and could hardly leave this place.

The geyser area was still unexplored. I was waiting for this for almost 6 months as in New Zealand we skipped watching the geysers erupting. Our next destination was the Old Faithful area and we almost missed the whole thing.
We arrived to the geyser just one minute before the expected eruption time and we found a good viewing spot. Few seconds later the geyser stared to blow some steam and a little water to the air. But nothing spectacular. Nothing big. 'I want my money back' - people were joking around us, and some of them started to leave.
I was sad like a child who was expecting a miracle and only got a piece of reality. We turned back and were thinking of going too, when we heard the loud noise and the geyser blew a huge column of hot water high to the air. YES! There it is! Finally it stayed loyal to its name. It lasted about a minute then calmed down again.

This is not the only geyser there so we went to see what else this place has to offer. Oh, it was wonderful to walk around. Springs, colorful pools, other geysers were all over the place. We saw pictures of elks and bisons coming close to this place to warm up a bit in the winter. They probably have no problems with rheumatic pains :-). Again, we stopped at almost every viewpoint on the way back to Gardiner and were very tired when we got back.
Rain started to fall in the evening and the next day was cold and miserable so we decided to go on.
'Bye-bye Yellowstone!'


We drove a day through the great plains of Montana to arrive to the mountains again, no cowboys on the way. Huge storms were developing from every direction, Gabor hoped we would see a tornado, but not this time. (Thank God!). The aim was to reach the Glacier National Park from the east entrance, drive through the park and do some hikes there.
The motels were so expensive near the entrance so we decided to drive a bit further to a small place called Babb. What a funny name! There was only one motel, one restaurant and one bar, they call them saloon here :-). We took a room in the motel, turned the heating on and went for a pizza to the saloon.
The flies, which were previously hibernated in the cold room woke up in the warm so we spent some time hunting them before we could finally take a rest. There are strange places in the US too...

It was raining heavily when we headed to the park entrance. The road linking the east and west sides was closed because it was snowing at night on the Pass, so we had to reschedule our plan a bit. Before we took the long detour, we drove into the park as long as we could and thought we would do a bit of walking on the closed road in the snowfall. I started to climb over the fence when Gabor said to me: 'Don't go across, a bear is coming down the road.' As I looked up, I saw a big black something marching down the closed road towards us. Huh, I was almost on the same side with the bear! We stayed at the fence and watched him coming. About 20 meters before the fence he took a left turn and went back to the forrest. 'It might be better not to walk here now, his brothers might be following not far behind'- we thought -'let's take the detour to the other side.'
The west side of the park was really breathtaking as the sun was out again. We drove up to the beginning of the pass when we did what we could not do at the other side: walked further on the closed road watching down to the valley and wondering how great this park could be in the summer with the hundreds of hiking possibilities.


Time passed by quickly and we thought more and more about our next destination, South-America. Gabor started to do serious planning so we decided to head back to Seattle and get ourselves ready for the next challenge, and if time allows, we can still go back to the Northern Cascades easily. It happened exactly like this. We went back to Seattle and as soon as we were ready with our shopping list we went north to Bellingham, a much more quieter place close to the mountains.
Visiting the Mount Baker region at the end of our trip was the perfect ending of our time in the US. We found fantastic sub-alpine flora at the area where we hiked. The Ptarmigan ridge trek took us to the footsteps of Mount Baker, another glacier topped volcano. The trek went through open fields, all dressed up with autumn colors, one of the finest scenery we have seen in this month.


Now we skip the winter and travel to the spring, where nature is awaking from the cold dream and starts living again. One more chapter to go.
Hasta la vista America, buenos dias Argentina!

---

Photos

Road closed - but not for bears
Glacier National Park