Becky, Jenna and I made an impromptu trip to Mt. Rainier yesterday.  We figured we might as well see it up close since today we're driving up to Bellingham to hang out with Jeff and Bethany and swinging out to Mt. Baker.

Simply put, Mt. Rainier is the biggest thing I've ever seen on planet earth.  It is enormous.  It's over 14,000 feet.  Think about that for a minute, that's taller than Pike's Peak, and Seattle is more or less at sea level.

The picture on the left (courtesy wikipedia) is the view of Rainier from the Space Needle in Seattle.  I think it's over 60 miles away from there. It's unbelievably huge.  When it's visible, it dwarfs everything else you can see.

Anyway, since the trip was unplanned, we basically entered in Mt. Rainier into the GPS and followed the directions.  The roads in the National Park were categorized by Becky as "pants-wettingly scary".  Driving next to a sheer cliff with no guardrail is indeed "white knuckle driving".

Despite that, it was wonderful fun.  We got some pretty good pictures, but with me driving, and Becky tending to Jenna, we didn't get as many as I'd like.  I'm sure we'll be back there with friends and family many times, so I wasn't that worried about it.

This is my best picture of the mountain.  It was a pretty hazy day (it wasn't visible at all from Bellevue), so even at close range (still about 10 miles away) I had to do some post-processing to bring out the details.  On the way out of the park, the sun was hitting it and it was even better, but we were in a hurry to get home.  It's interesting that my close-up picture does do it's size justice (the space needle picture above conveys the scale much better), but in person the size really makes you dizzy.  We came around a corner to this view, and Becky and I both just about had a heart attack.

We're about to head up to Bellingham.  I'll try to get some better pictures of Mt. Baker.

Oh yeah... and today is Labor Day, so enjoy this Homestarrunner classic.