Grand Park - June 29, 2002
This trip wasn't at all worthy of a trip report, except for one thing... a fascinating new creature we discovered.
Panorama of part of Grand Park
The plan was to bring our kites up to Grand Park. Big flat open spaces on a (presumably windy)
ridge top. Sounded like good kiting terrain. We had read a report of someone up there a couple
weeks ago, and they were able to drive to within a quarter mile of the "trailhead". From there
it's only 3 miles to the park. Their pictures still seemed to show a lot of snow left. At
5600ft, how could there *not* be tons of snow left?
Odd then, that the road, to 4600ft - only 1000ft lower - did not have a speck of snow on it.
We thought so too.
View up the west fork of the White River from the edge of Grand Park.
The way up to Grand Park is a little challenging in the route-finding department. Actually,
it wasn't that bad, until I decided to take out my GPS to verify where we were. It put us
on the opposite side of a ridge from where we really were! It only had a few satellites, so the
accuracy wasn't good (~110ft), but this was ridiculous! Temporarily ignoring the GPS reading,
we continued on, and things looked good. I took another reading. Still way off. WTF?
Checking back on a map after the trip, I saw that the GPS was giving readings that were off by
about 700 feet (despite that fact that it had locks on 3 satellites and displayed the accuracy
as ~100ft). Good to know you should never trust your GPS!
Click on the picture for a movie about the snows of Grand Park warning: audio
Our first view of Grand Park was one of a sea of white, but it had melt streams running through
in. We slogged across the slushy snow, and went through the first few groves of trees, one
of the main open expanses. We beheld a sea of green, with a few snow patches here and there.
Mt Rainier peeks through the clouds.
Rainier began to make an appearance through the clouds, but we could never see more than one tenth
of it. The cloud hole moved around upper Willis Wall and Liberty Ridge, and occasionally over to the
Emmons. It looked like there was a good amount of new snow on the upper mountain. Willis Wall was
totally white, whereas it had looked quite brown from my apartment a few days earlier.
Just as we were packing up to leave, I noticed some bones on the ground. What could this be?
Scouring the area a little more thoroughly, we found the main stash in the nearby grove of trees.
Ribs, fins, a skull, vertebrae. It was all here. In the interest of science, Greg and I knew
what we had to do.
Using our expert knowledge of such matters, we hastily gathered the pieces, and perfectly
reassembled the skeleton in the exact position the animal was in when it died. It looked like this:
Note the left raised fist, a final act of defiance in the face of
certain death.
Dr. Greg analyzes the cranium.
Note the presence of hind fins. One can only speculate
what use the animal had for fins in the mountains. Perhaps this proves this area was
once underwater, but more likely these fins were used to ascend rock faces by friction, sort
of like tennis shoes.
The large mandibles indicate that this was no wussy GU-eating animal.
Once the skeleton was reconstructed, the next step was to determine what the animal actually
looked like.
Are you ready? Our final analysis is here