Past And Present

Day 59: Watching the rain fall through the office window, I knew that patience would bring no change to the intensity of the precipitation, so I slipped on my hat and jacket and resigned myself to getting wet as I walked the half-mile loop known as the Trail of the Shadows.

It was on the edge of this meadow that James Longmire and his family established a hotel and hot-spring baths in the days before Mount Rainier National Park came into being, and one cannot walk this trail today without feeling some connection to the past. John Muir may have stood in this same spot en route to the summit of Mount Rainier in 1888, gazing up to Eagle Peak, shrouded in clouds. Perhaps, standing here near the Travertine Mound, he may have formulated any one of the inspiring phrases he later penned, inspired by the beauty of the Pacific Northwest despite its whims of weather.

Today, rain notwithstanding, I walked in the footsteps of those pioneers and as always, thought of the lives they lived in this place I love. The scenes I looked out upon are little changed from what their eyes saw when first they came to this place; past and present only different windows in the house of time.