Dear Kinder Teacher,
Please excuse Joey’s absence yesterday, Feb. 7. He was unable to make it to school because the sun was shining, not a cloud in the sky, and the temperature was above 50 degrees. In place of classroom time, we worked on map reading and addition as we added elevation and mile distances. We also measured angle of slopes and talked about avalanche danger.

Thank you for understanding,

According to the forecast, Feb 7 would be the last day of sunshine for a while and it happened to fall on a Tuesday. The kids eagerly packed up their backpacks and threw on their snow gear. We left Federal Way at 9:30 and arrived at paradise at 12:00. There were only ten cars in the parking lot. The place just seemed so bare. We intended to snowshoe, but I figured staying on the main trail would make snowshoeing unnecessary. Paradise was getting about 15 mph winds.

We slowly made our way over to the start of the Paradise snowfield. The parking lot was a solid sheet of ice. Elissa made sure to skate across it. We headed up on what is normally called the Glacier Vista Trail. Over the next hour and a half we followed the well stomped down trail toward Panorama Point. At times this was slow going. The kids were learning how to effectively kick steps and traverse over (what seemed to them) steeper drop offs. As we left the trees, we were feeling the wind pretty strong. In an hour and a half, we made it up to Glacier Vista. The views just as amazing in the winter time.

We ate lunch and huddled together to keep warm. After about fifteen minutes and some debate on whether we should hike up to the summit of Rainier, I convinced them that we should head back down to the car to get some hot chocolate. The return was just as exciting as the ascent. Both Joey and Elissa were more comfortable on the snow and felt the need to run and slide on the trail (on hard compacted snow). Oh, well, they had fun and that is all that mattered. We made it back to the car by 3:00.