Mount Rainier National Park

While all of the boys are away at camps this week, I put together a fun roadtrip to NPS Parks in Washington State. Our first stop was at Mount Rainier to take a hike and get my official stamp. I am so glad I got the new iPhone 13 PRO as it takes awesome photos. We passed by beautiful Mayfield Lake and then drove on the very high bridge over the stunning green Cowlitz River. At the park, we hiked on Kautz Creek Nature Trail and admired the Tahoma Creek.

And we are pretty sure we snowboarded at Paradise Bowl on our previous trip.

I often have said that snowboarding changed my life. In my mid-twenties, I was in a cycle or working hard and playing hard. It was the balance in the advertising lifestyle, especially at Wieden & Kennedy during the Nineties. At a party, a few friends and I made a pact that we would learn how to snowboard. So the next weekend, we opted to stay in on Friday night and were up to the mountain by 8am for our first lesson. It was challenging, and it hurt in more parts than we’d like to admit, and we had the best day ever. On the way home, we declared this would become our new Saturday ritual … Snowboarding on Saturdays. Soon we moved on from the instructor and took chair lifts higher and higher. Then our favorite friends started missing us on Friday nights and began joining us on Saturdays. Now it was a snowboarding party on the mountain and a new kind of work hard and play hard.

Fast forward a few years later, I am now snowboarding in the back country often with my husband. Through a work connection, I met an amazing friend Vanessa. She and her husband, at the time, invited us up to Mt. Rainier to snowboard off the backside. We woke up early, made a big pot of coffee and set out on our adventure. We met at the Henry M. Jackson Memorial Visitor Center in Mount Rainier National Park. We hiked up Camp Muir and cruised down the Muir snowfields. After one run … which was massive and took hours … Vanessa and I warmed up at the bar, and the guys decided to take one more. We thought they were crazy to go again due to the time, but it was a pretty epic experience. Soon it was pitch black out and this was pre-cell phone, and we started to worry they were lost. So we waited ... and waited. Thankfully they arrived intact and we celebrated with a drink at the bar. It was an awesome day of adventure indeed!