NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE 



Mount Rainier in Winter 



In July the flanks of Mount Rainier are a fairyland of wild flowers. 

 Everywhere the pale stars of the erythroniums, the white cassiope- 

 bells, the lavender rays of asters jostle heads so closely that the little 

 folk themselves could not pass without rubbing shoulders with them. 

 In January Rainier is another fairyland — a white silence of snows 

 sweeping from the lower forests up to the glaciers. The smooth 

 slopes are broken only by dark-green shadings in the frondlike, sculp- 

 tured masses of the snow-encrusted firs and hemlocks; by icicle-hung 

 streams, or the bare branches of willows showing red and yellow 

 against the white. 



The midwinter five-day outing of the Seattle Mountaineers to Para- 

 dise Park is as important an event in their year as the summer outing 

 itself. In spite of rain or snow, of flood or blizzard, the new year 

 is always begun as all new years should begin, up as near heaven as 

 the limitations of men and mountains will allow. 



We were a hundred and twenty-five this year. Mountaineers for the 

 most part, of course, but with a sprinkling of Mazamas and Sierra 

 Club as well. In spite of the severe cold of the preceding weeks, we 

 encountered no snow at all on the first afternoon's walk from Ash- 

 ford to Longmire's Springs. The weather was clear and not cold. 

 Mists closed in next morning, but little rain fell. The trail was prac- 

 tically free from snow until we were past Narada Falls. Even then 

 it was so well crusted that we did not have to put on snowshoes. 



The inn at Paradise, which was turned over to us to run for our- 

 selves, was stocked with provisions sent in before the snow. We had 

 our own cooks and were our own waiters — took care of the rooms and 

 kept up the fires ourselves. The great living-room, buttressed with 

 silvery logs cut from the old Ghost Forest near the Mazama camp of 

 1905, has a huge fireplace at either end. With a piano and a phono- 

 graph for dance music, with stunts staged by our talent and a daily 

 "newspaper" to read aloud, the long evenings sped away like magic. 



Snowshoeing began in a snowstorm. White slopes rounded away 

 into the clouds till one could not say where earth ended and sky began. 

 All morning on our sky-line trail up to the head of Sluiskin Fall 

 the snow sifted us with white, making us look like cohorts of Santa 

 Claus. Coasting, tobogganing, or ski-running that day was like para- 

 chuting down into the bottomless pit, for the final destination was hid- 

 den in fog. The ski-runners had rather the best of it, for they were 

 not further blinded by the clouds of powdered snow that the tobog- 

 gans raised. Over crests and into holes, through woods or into wood- 



