As I was working on revisiting an older recipe on TrailCooking, my mind wandered. I knew I had made the recipe on the trail long ago. I went into my photos and found the trip and some poorly shot meal images. That is probably why the recipe had no photos attached, I realized. It was in the summer of 2011.
But the photos of the trip? They were phenomenal. Maybe it was not award-winning, but it reminded me how much I had loved finally hiking and finishing that trail. I had waited years for it to be rebuilt after the massive flooding wiped it off the land. And I was pregnant with my third child. I knew it was my only chance to hike it for a long time, so I went. I was so anemic then, and I was on the struggle bus for the whole 7-mile hike. But I remember, as I sat in the meadow, how much it meant to me to be there. It ended up being my last real hike till the next year, so it meant a lot to me.
As the snow is starting to melt in the Cascade Mountains and the trails at Mount Rainier National Park thaw out, I am constantly thinking of sub-alpine hiking. There’s nothing like a reminder of hikes to come when down-low spring is still firmly happening and summer is still a bit away.
The recipe was Herbed Tomato Couscous Salad, a no-cook lunch-friendly meal. It is vegetarian as well.
We noshed on it in Glacier Basin, a subalpine meadow between the mountain and the ridges that shoot up to Burroughs, high above.
Trail cooking photography had a long way to come. But yeah, that view in the distance? It made up for some of the out of focus, in the dark photography.
Lunch was served. On a pile of well-trodden dirt! Yum.
But that view, from under the tree’s shade, we sat in.
I wrote a trip report about the hike and all we saw.
That trip was magical. There were glacier-fed rivers and creeks, forests, meadows, and even a corpulent black bear filling itself in a low meadow.
The massive Emmons Glacier is in your face. Rainier is in your face often throughout the hike, but at the end, just the top of her shows in the meadows.
The trail calls to you to wander past the backcountry camps until it ends, where the mountain climbers take off on their adventures.
The hike out was, in some ways, even better. With the mountain behind us, you notice the meadows and often look up to Sunrise, thousands of feet above the river valley.
I made a new recipe that day, which eventually got lost on the website until today when I went down memory lane.
~Sarah