Glass Feet

Fire watchers in the 1950's lived like hermits in the Cascades and they lived in one-room lookouts on places like this, Tolmie Peak in Mt Rainier National Park. Famous writers such as Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder did some time here, where they were also able to write in complete solitude. Glass-footed lightning stools were small footstools that the firewatchers would stand on during storms. If their lookouts were struck, they would likely fry and their only saving grace might be to stand on the stool. I wish I had something like that at work.

I am absolutely mesmerized by Mt Rainier. She's visible from Seattle on clear days, and will catch me off-guard, suddenly coming into view while driving along a road. She soars high and majestic above the skyline. Sounds silly, but it kind of makes my day when I can see Rainier on an ordinary work day. So it only seemed fitting that my last weekend in Seattle was a Rainier close-up, a lovely jaunt up to Tolmie Peak in Mt Rainier National Park. I was accompanied by Tweedledee and Tweedledum, two silly work friends Paul and Lincoln.

I spoke to a ranger who was going to spend the night at the lookout and I was envious of him being able to see the mountain at night and watched the sunrise. The weather was crisp and clear which I'm sure would make for excellent mountain viewing.

"As the light increased I discovered around me an ocean of mist, which by chance reached up exactly to the base of the tower, and shut out every vestige of the earth, while I was left floating on this fragment of the wreck of a world, on my carved plank, in cloudland...All around beneath me was spread for a hundred miles on every side, as far as the eye could reach, an undulating country of clouds, answering in the varied swell of its surface to the terrestrial world it veiled. It was such a country as we might see in dreams, with all the delights of paradise."

-Henry David Thoreau