Somehow a pair of shorts had fallen from my car and gotten soaked by the Washington rain.  I rigged together an impromptu air drying consisting of my car.

By the time I got to Mount Rainier they were quite dry, just like the park itself.  Mount Rainier is shaped in almost every way by the movement of glaciers and the river basins were hugely disproportionate to the actual flow at the time which can change by orders of magnitude as the glaciers on Rainier advance and retreat.  Even more rock is scored out as chunks break off and migrate down.

The peek itself was white and photogenic.

Besides the mountain, climbing the mountain, or looking at what was falling off of the mountain, there wasn’t much to the park besides a crazy number of bodies of water formed with melt water.  Here again I learned that man is a herding species as whenever I turned out to take a picture, two or three other cars would follow.  This time I decided to try to take advantage of this at a glacial lake with spectacular blue ice that was only visible at a distance between trees.  Glacial ice forms when snow compresses into ice which creates a very blue ice.  It’s impressively hard and dense with a slightly deformed crystal lattice.  This was my shot with a 200mm lens from a snow bank over a fir stand.  I doubt the German man wearing sandals got a good shot with his camera phone.

I left Rainier on my way to Tacoma, Washington to visit Ben Fatula.  Ben is a chef in the Armed Forces looking to move into the private sector and eventually open a restaurant after a car accident which left him with chronic back pain.  We had some Thai food, a type of cuisine that I find underwhelming and obsessed with peanuts but seeing him was nice.

Then, it was off to Canada…

I spruced up my car in anticipation of crossing the Canadian border and tried to remove extraneous crap from the immediate view of the crossing officer.  I get to the front of the line:

Guard: Where are you coming from?
Me: Pennsylvania.
Guard: How long do you plan on being in Canada?
Me: Three days.
Guard: What are the contents of your cargo?
Me: Mostly camping equipment.
Guard: Who is your current employer?
Me: None.
Guard: So you’ve driven from PA to Vancouver for three days, have no job and are mostly carrying camping equipment?
Me: Yes, sir.
Guard: Please pull to the side.

The only way I could raise more red flags was if I said I was a travelling oregano salesman or if my last name were Hussein.

I pulled over, had my phone and passport taken and looked on as every item was removed from my car.   The only other people waiting were what appeared to be a drunk British woman and a collection of Asian women.  After a bit they waved me back over and gave me my keys back pronouncing my car clean.  Then I saw that in the process of inspecting my car the ding in my front door that prevented it from opening was turned into a full blown dent. Boo.

The signage in Canada was bewildering.  The first thing I noticed was that the posted speed limit conversion was a bit off: 20 MPH is not 30 KPH, it’s 32.18…  Canada takes us for chumps.  Also, the yield and one way signs had no words on them but all the others were is both English and French.  Fuel was also not always listed with the obligatory 9/10ths cent extra, and in Surrey I saw gas at 1.133 dollars a liter or about 4.32 a gallon.  Eak.

My host that night was Tom Weir/Tweir.  His cat is adorable:

Tweir was tired and I was tired resulting in the last three hours of the day ending in rambling about team operation.  To bed.