GNT #173: Sweatshirts and tennis shoes

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I'm publishing this from a campground in Maine.

I have meetings I pushed out to get here. I used to not push them. There was a stretch of years where I was so busy I forgot what it was like to have fun, and I don't mean that as a figure of speech. I mean I would have read that last sentence and not known what the woman who wrote it was talking about.

Summer, now, is when I make myself remember.

So we drove the motorhome out from Minnesota to Acadia National Park for a few weeks of family fun. Right now there's salt air coming through the screen and somebody's kid (not mine, for once) is shrieking happily two sites over.

Last year at this time we were on the other side of the country, working our way down the west coast in this same motorhome. The smell of pine this morning reminded me of one particular morning out there.

Mount Rainier. Skyline Trail. 6:45am.

We were there early to beat the crowds and pulled into the trailhead to find almost nobody there. The ranger station wasn't open yet. The trail was half frozen underfoot. And the four of us got out in sweatshirts and tennis shoes (correction: my youngest was in his Crocs).

Now. The people who actually climb Mount Rainier do not wear tennis shoes (or Crocs).

We knew this within the first ten minutes, because they started passing us. Real mountaineers. Spikes on their boots, poles in both hands, packs with things clipped to the outside of them. Heads down, eyes up the trail, no doubt going all the way to the top. They went past us up the switchbacks the way you move past someone you might be worried about.

And there we were. Ed and me and the kids, picking our way up a frozen trail in the shoes we wear to the grocery store.

It was one of the best mornings of the whole trip.

The Skyline Trail climbs about 1,800 feet, and it is steep, vertical in places, and we did the whole thing at a seven-year-old's pace, stopping every few switchbacks to catch our breath and look back at how far down the parking lot had gone. Marmots watched us from the rocks. Chipmunks sat right at the edge of the trail, close enough to touch, unbothered because people feed them even though they're not supposed to.

There were crocuses, purple crocuses, pushing up out of frozen ground, which I did not know was a thing flowers could do. The fog would close in until we couldn't see anything, ten feet of white in every direction, and then it would break open and there was blue sky and the whole mountain dropping away below us.

On the way down we gave up on dignity. Ed and the kids "glissaded" down the snowy stretches standing up on their tennis shoes. I tried, and then sat down on the seat of my pants and skidded the whole way, which the kids voted the high point of the trip and possibly their lives.

By the time we came back down, the ranger station had opened. Dash collected his junior ranger badge, saying the pledge, very serious about it. And posted right there by the door was the sign.

"Caution. The full Skyline Trail is not recommended unless you have spikes, hiking poles, GPS, and expert experience wayfinding and navigating snow bridges and avalanche terrain."

We had sweatshirts and tennis shoes.

I think about that morning a lot. The mountaineers who passed us were after the summit, and I hope they got it. We were never going to the summit. We came for the morning, and we got the whole of it, marmots and crocuses and fog and all, four under-equipped people having the time of their lives on a mountain that, by every official measure, we had no business being delighted by.

The salt air just shifted. Somebody's starting a fire down the row. I should go find my people.

I hope you get a morning like that this summer. One you have no business being so happy on.
 

I'm always rooting for you. See you next week.

-Colleen

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