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. Easter must have been magic, because I got to the top and it was amazing (like French-onion soup or coconut cake).
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.
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At the bottom of Panorama Point.
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People headed from Panorama up to Camp Muir
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Up on top of Panorama Point
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Biiiig hill up there 🙂
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Mt. Adams
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Mt. St. Helens
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Mt. Hood
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At the Panorama Point restroom, closed for the season
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Glissade
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Glissade
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I made it, I’m alive!
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Ant-people on top of Panorama Point
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Doin’ the King Tut
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Love the stunted trees up here
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I make a fine butt-trail, don’t I?
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Mazama Ridge area