Well, once again, it was off to Tolmie Peak for my annual full moonrise and sunset extravaganza on July 13th. Joining me on this fine adventure was TPayne himself. It was a few years ago that I managed to get TPayne addicted to coming along and it hasn't been too hard to get him to keep coming back for more hikes to Tolmie Peak.
We arrived at a busy Mowich Lake parking lot at the same time and found a spot to park our dusty cars. That was after surviving a rather rough road. There are some severe potholes for the last 4 miles leading up to the national park boundary. Once you get into the national park the road is in pretty good shape.
We set off up the trail at about 5:00ish and arrived at the fire lookout at about 7:00ish and once we arrived it was time for the photography madness to begin. Since it was cloudy we weren't sure what kind of sunset or moonrise we would be getting. But once we arrived at the lookout, we could see to the south that there were no clouds and that the clouds were slowly moving to the north. Mt. St. Helens was lit up by the setting sun. By the time it got dark enough clouds had cleared out around Rainier that we were able to see the full moon, but we didn't get to see it rise since the clouds hadn't completely cleared off by then. The sunset was rather spectacular, with the top half of Rainier getting some sun on it. There was some high clouds over the Puget Sound and the Olympics, but we could see a small band of no clouds right over the top of the Olympics which made for a very colorful sunset. At about sunset we watched some intermittent lightning strike over the south Puget Sound. We tried to get some pictures of the lightning, but since we didn't have the slightest clue on how to take lightning pictures and too dang slow at pressing the shutter button we were unsuccessful at getting any. I brought along my LED Maglite flashlight and it is much brighter than I thought it would be. I was able to barely light up the fire lookout from the trail next to Eunice Lake. TPayne was wondering if the flashlight was melting any snow.
We began the walk out to Mowich Lake at 11:00 and arrived at our cars at a couple of minutes before 1:00 in the morning. On the way out we saw two deer with their eyes glowing in the light of our flashlights. Since I had to be back to work at 8:00 in the morning, I decided to drive home and I arrived home at 3:15 in morning and was in bed by 3:30 to get 2.5 hours of sleep before dragging myself to work. On the drive out I saw my first ever porcupine.
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