Today we drove out to Mt. Rainier only to find that the entrance was blocked off. So the big Rainier exploration will have to wait I guess. The drive out was gorgeous though and seeing Mt. Rainier dominating the vista as we approached was spectacular (no pictures though as I was planning on snapping some when we were actually in the park and missed my chance on the drive out). Here are a couple of other shots from the outing though.

On the way back we stopped at a spot about nineteen miles outside of Yakima where I was told that people frequently rock climb. There were probably eight to ten climbers out when we hiked up to get a closer look. Most of them where climbing off of fixed bolts already in place in the rock, but quite clearly there is a ton of opportunity to expand outside of these locations. You should be able to see a tiny climber if you look closely at the larger version of the middle picture on the left. The river you see in these pictures is the Tieton River (pronunciation: rhymes with the word “diet” plus the ending “on”). The bottom left picture is a look at an one-way gate that supposedly will keep larger ungulate animals out of the area but will also let them out should they somehow become trapped inside. Also stumbled across yet another rattlesnake (bottom right picture). Ho hum.