Fran and had a most glorious, wonderful, fantastic, warm, sun-burning day on Easter snow-shoeing up and over Panorama Point from Paradise at Mt. Rainier. I’ll admit, I had tried snow-shoeing up to the top of Panorama Point a few weeks ago and chickened out, turning around and sliding/clawing my way back down, vowing that I WOULD get up there some day. I finally I got to the top and it was amazing.
We got to the parking lot at Paradise just before 8 a.m. and started the nice hike up Skyline Trail, then followed a bunch of others up the Panorama hill. We were very very blessed to have nice long, sharp fangs on our snow-shoes, because it was basically a 45-degree ice slope and others without snow shoes or micro-spikes were having a hard time. Hard to describe the view from the top, other than to say it’s incredible !!
Coming down the other side of Panorama, we got into a kind of sketchy traverse and ended up doing our first fun glissade to get out of it, then of course, since we were already wet and snow-covered, we just had to glissade down every nice hill we could find between Panorama and Mazama Ridge 🙂 Too much fun, think of it as an analogy between surfing vs. body-surfing and sledding vs. free-butt-sliding.
We stopped and had a picnic with incredible views of the Tatoosh Range, Goat Rocks, Mts. Adams, Hood, and St. Helens, then wound our way down Mazama Ridge and back to the Lodge. All in a a most glorious way to spend Easter, and one more check off of the ole’ Bucket List.
