The day after coming back by ferry to Seattle at 10 PM, we rose and shone (?) real early to drive out to Mt. Rainier! You can actually see Mt. Rainier from Seattle on clear summer days, but due the smoke that had been plaguing the area, we hadn’t been able to during our visit in Seattle. We DID catch a quick glimpse while we were landing but seeing it in person was something on a whole other level!!!
We took a couple of quick hikes around the mountain, one of which included a foot bridge over a stream which was super cool! I feel like photography didn’t really do the blues and the symmetry of the Pacific Northwest justice but here goes on trying to show it off!!
The next day we drove a couple of hours to see Crater Lake in Oregon! As you’ll see in the pictures below, we kinda got unlucky because the smoke had settled in the area so the once CRYSTAL blue lake, like it’s literally KNOWN for being so clear and so blue, was pretty hazy. It only got worse and worse as we drove around the lake and towards sunset. We actually saw a bit of a forest fire on the way there which was terrifying but I do hope that the smokiness goes down over the next few weeks because just from the smell you could tell it couldn’t be good to be breathing in that smokiness if you stayed in the area too long. Park rangers were saying they expected it to last into the fall π But the haze did actually make for something interestingly cool pictures I think!
So that just about wraps up this 3 part mini-blogging series!! If you missed the other posts here they are!