Caution: Meadow Repairs in Progress

 

I did not see the repairs in progress, but I can think of two reasons why not:

1. The repairs happen too slowly for my buzzy mammal brain to process.

2. The work is done at night by long-tailed voles with tiny wheelbarrows.

(Photo taken in Mount Rainier National Park)

Parkitecture at Sunrise, Mount Rainier National Park

The "Stockade Group" Visitor Center

The "Yakima Park Stockade Group" buildings at Sunrise were built in the 1930s–1940s, modeled consciously on frontier blockhouses. I think that they would look familiar to a Roman legionary in first-century Germania as well — who thought that the roots of the National Park Service ran that deep?

Sunrise Lodge, side view

Sunrise Lodge was built in 1931, originally as part of a never-competed resort hotel. Behind me — but un-photographed — was a parkitectural "comfort station" that is also on the National Register of Historic Places.

"You mean there's a senator for all this?"

View looking NE into the Cascade Mtns. from Mount Rainier National Park.

Said by the very urban poet Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), whom the not-so-urban poet Gary Snyder in the 1950s coaxed  into working one season as a fire lookout in the Cascades.

The incident is found on p. 31 of Snyder's book The Practice of the Wild, which is on my hypothetical desert-island book list.

And that whole brief era is described in detail in John Suiter's Poets on the Peaks.

It was probably the same summer that the two of them encountered a party of anglers on a forest trail and Ginsberg intoned, "WE are forest beatniks." A line that I will never have the opportunity to use.