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Mt. Rainier

My brother Dave took these pictures last weekend when he drove toward Mt. Rainier National Park, where the mountain is shining above us in the warm sun. This weird temperature inversion in Washington has persisted for almost 10 days.

The road up to Hawaii

That smirch you see in the distance is Seattle, where we've been creeping around under a freezing and dirty fog.  But if you can escape to the foothills or up the mountain passes, it's brilliant sunshine and t-shirt weather. And the higher you go, the warmer it gets.  At the top of the lift at the Snoqualmie Ski area, the temperature was 50 degrees yesterday.  To put that in perspective, we haven't been out of the 30's in Seattle for days.

This has been our dismal front porch view. You're used to hearing me complain about the endless rain,  but it will be welcome tonight when it finally comes back to clear out the polluted air.  

On the bright side, it was just another blue bird day at the barn yesterday. The sun in the foothills is unseasonably strong, and you could almost fool yourself into thinking summer was close. In just a week Mt. Si went from this...

To this...