Northwest Adventure - Big Trees and Sunrise

After 3 days in Seattle it was time to up sticks and head to Packwood in Snoqualmie National Forest. This is at Point B on the map below which shows the route we took over the course of the holiday.

A little worried at this point that I'm going to run out of books somewhere in the wilderness so we stop at a bookshop before heading too far off of the beaten track and I end up getting (you should feel free to skip to the section that says AND SKIP TO THE END to skip past the superfluous information on which books I boought and what I thought).

The Collector by John Fowles (good but suffers from being the book that started a couple of genres which take away the shock of the original - unlike The Magus which he also wrote which is probably the most disturbing book I've read)
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (which I also saw in the children's section of Barnes and Noble the other day, which seemed a little ambitious in terms of placement or may have been a clerical error - a good book though I didn't feel I wanted to recommend it above a lot of the other books I've read recently such as When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson).

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson on the other hand not only passes the 'how many pages per pound (or dollar)' test, which is important when on holiday but also completely restored my faith in Science Fiction writers (even though it's really a mix of historic and contemporary fiction - sort of like Iain Banks would be if he was a better writer).

AND SKIP TO THE END

On the way we stopped off at one of the smaller national parks on the way where there were the most enormous Douglas Firs. There are pictures below but to see these properly you really need to pivot your monitor vertically and set your screen resolution to 512 x 65,536



This was the first time I really couldn't see the tops of the trees. The forest was also more like a jungle in many ways where you really couldn't imagine how you could walk through it unless there was a pre-existing path or you were wielding a machete, lightsaber or bulldozer, and even then you'd have to avoid the big trees.

We also stopped off at a place called Sunrise which is the highest point you can drive to in the Mt Rainier national park at 6,400 ft. WE stopped off for a wander around and some views of Mt Rainier.




Then on to Packwood, which is a small, run down town in the middle of nowhere, so far in fact that there is no mobile phone reception and tthere hasn't been any for most of the journey either. The motel we're in is also a small run down motel in the middle of the run down town in the middle of nowhere. The motel and the town both look as though they almost made it and ran out of steam and are just hanging on. We got an idea of why this was the next day...