Tag Archives: Mt Rainier

Greetings from the Best Coast

Greetings from the [Quarantined] Coast! Hoping this finds you safe and well, and staying home to help “flatten the curve” of the virus that is suddenly everywhere at once. Here in Washington we’re sheltering in place—and as fate would have it, today I am celebrating (from home) the release date of my newest book! Greetings from the Best Coast is a companion book of postcards to my popular Best Coast book—a gift for fellow travelers or a whole packet of instant travel souvenirs.

I was hoping to be able to unveil this news in a snazzier fashion (like at one of my many now-cancelled events, thanks to the ‘rona). Still, it feels so great to see this little book in person! The book contains 32 illustrated postcards (2 each of 16 designs) with quintessentially West Coast scenes and hand-lettering. They’re perfect for bringing along on your next road trip to mail souvenirs from the road (or from the comfort of your reading nook), for sending an invitation to join you on your next adventure, or for presenting the whole book as a gift to your favorite travel companion.

Sasquatch Books, as usual, did a beautiful job of creating an appealing package, with a gorgeous hardcover (with illustrated endsheets! My nerdy heart is all aflutter) wrapped around the stack of postcards inside.

Since we are all armchair travelers right now, I am planning to mail these to friends and family around the country—as a fun memento of trips past and in hopes of being able to travel again someday in the future, when we get to the other side of this crisis.

Major thanks to the team at Sasquatch for making these postcards a reality—especially to my amazing editor Hannah Elnan, and the brilliant art director, Anna Goldstein. If you’d like your own copy, you can find it in the shop!

Our best idea

Mt. Rainier National Park, WA

Tomorrow is the 100th birthday of the National Park Service. All of America seems to be celebrating right now, and rightly so. In my opinion, our wildest pockets are our true national treasures, and our national parks, as Wallace Stegner said, our best idea.

Olympic National Park, WA

So since I’ve spent a good chunk of my sketching life in national parks both close to home…

Arches National Park, UT

…and far afield…

Crater Lake National Park, OR

I figured I’d add my voice to the celebratory din, in the form of a little sketchbook retrospective.

Badlands National Park, SD

Beyond the centennial itself, I’m always up for toasting the parks. Not only do I think park rangers are the best people on earth,

Redwood National Park, CA

but I also sometimes think they’re the only thing standing between wildness and destruction.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, NM

And anyway, I’m not exaggerating when I say I’m a total park nut myself. It’s my goal to visit every NPS property before I die, including national parks, historic sites, national monuments, everything. (Actually, I’ve crossed a goodly chunk of them off the list already—

Guadalupe Mountains National Park, TX

—and I even have the stamps to prove it.)

Olympic National Park, WA

I know I have a long path ahead of me before I reach that goal,

Grand Canyon National Park, AZ

and getting there won’t be easy.

Big Bend National Park, TX

Yet I can’t tell you how grateful I am that the opportunity exists in the first place—

Rocky Mountain National Park, CO

that so many people have fought to preserve these wild places, and won.

Saguaro National Park, AZ

Best of all is the feeling that no matter how long it might take me to get to each park with my sketchbook,

Glacier National Park, MT

I know it’ll be there waiting for me, as close to unchanged as humanly possible. Thanks to the National Park Service, the window of opportunity remains open.

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Mountain shadows

A lot of people are going to be up early today to participate in holiday craziness—but for me, this time of year has a completely different incentive to be out before the sun. Because if you live in the South Sound area and you’re very, very lucky, you might catch that rare phenomenon where the sun rises behind Mt. Rainier and casts a massive shadow on the clouds above.

The moment doesn’t last long—about the same amount of seconds as alpenglow does. And the conditions have to be absolutely perfect for it to happen: clear enough for the mountain and sun to be visible (which almost never happens in winter), but with just enough mid-level cloud cover to give the shadow a reflecting surface. And you can only see it from certain areas where the sunrise is perfectly aligned behind the mountain (like the solstice sunrises with which places like Stonehenge and Mission San Juan Bautista are intentionally aligned). All of this makes it so uncommon that we’re lucky if conditions are right once a year.

In my six-plus years here, I’ve only seen it in person twice—and on Monday, I was finally lying in wait with my sketchbook. It felt like winning the lottery.

Super moonrise

I had other plans for today’s post, but I had a surprise on Saturday evening that changed all of that. I spent the day on the Oregon coast, and arrived on the home stretch just as the last light was fading. As I neared the Nisqually Delta, I looked east out of habit, where I knew I’d see Mt. Rainier above the ridge. The moon was just on its way up, but this time it was no ordinary moonrise. The full moon that night was a supermoon—where the full moon coincides with the point on its orbit where it is closest to Earth.

The result was jaw-dropping—I had just enough time and presence of mind to take the next exit, head to the nearest uphill spot, pull over, and jot down a quick sketch with my pencil. When I got home (and had access to a proper lamp!), I filled in the color.

It’ll never match what I saw that night. But at the very least, it’ll always remind me of the moment—and how lucky I was to be able to witness it.

Perfect panorama

For the many days of the year, these mountains are invisible. If you showed up in western Washington in November, you might not even know we had mountains here. Our rainy Northwest climate makes these peaks disappear into the clouds on most days—even, sometimes, when you’re right there, standing amongst them.

Not in the summertime, though. The best thing about the Northwest is that in the summer, the clouds disappear for months on end—and nearly every day we’re treated to crystal-clear views and flawless blue skies.

Bright and early

I’m generally a morning person—especially when it comes to sketching. But I live at 47 degrees north latitude, where for months at a time, being a morning person means spending a lot of time in the dark. Right now I’m still shaking off that lazy Northwest winter-mode version of “early,” where 8 am still feels like the crack of dawn. Now that we’re racing toward the summer solstice, “early” means something much different. If I want to make more sketches like this one (where, I might add, I had to drive for an hour just to reach that location!)—well, I’m clearly going to have to whip myself back into shape.

Living library

I love sketching wildflowers and other plants—but unfortunately, I’m really not great at identifying them. Of course, sketching is an excellent way to cement the information into your brain, but it doesn’t help much when you’re not sure what you’re looking at. I’m not a fan of standing there, juggling sketchbook and guidebook, trying to find one particular yellow flower amongst a huge grid of yellow flower photos (that all look, well, frankly identical to each other, and not at all like what’s in front of me), just to label my drawing correctly.

Enter the National Park Service. Wondering what kind of unusual flower that is? Forgot the name of that cactus? Just look around—nine times out of ten there’ll be a little engraved label nearby. Not near a marked trail? Just look in the little pamphlet the ranger handed you when you arrived! I swear, park rangers are the librarians of the natural world (and since I’m always telling people that librarians and park rangers are the most helpful folks on earth, this seems to fit).

I rely on this so much that when I’m not in a national park (or arboretum, or conservatory), I get frustrated. I mean, how great would it be if every front-yard garden, every school hedgerow, every city park came equipped with tiny interpretive signs?

Because after all, you never know when a sketcher is going to happen by.

Get a shovel

I don’t know about you, but I’m always tempted to let my New Year’s resolutions pile up as high as the snowbanks at Mt. Rainier. Of course, it’s much harder to fulfill them than make them, but I know there’s at least one that I’ll have no problem keeping:

Just keep sketching.

Smoke signals

Tomorrow is my fifth anniversary of living in Washington state—so in honor of the occasion, the next few posts will highlight the Pacific Northwest. It’s been fascinating to see all the faces and incarnations of Mt. Rainier in my time here (so fascinating, in fact, that I did a whole book about it). But I have never seen “the Mountain” (as we call it here) like I did on the day of this drawing. Because of the wildfires that were raging elsewhere the Cascades at that time, I was literally standing on the Mountain, and I could barely make it out.

Unfortunately, with the increase of wildfires we’ve seen in the West lately, I fear this might not be the last time I see the Mountain like this. Sending good thoughts to everyone living in areas affected by wildfires this summer.