March 14, 2005, Paradise Mt. Rainier

    We hiked up to Moon Rocks (Muir Snowfield) and snowboarded down. The snow at Paradise was frozen in the morning so hard that I thought it might be more fun to snowboard the asphalt parking lot at Paradise. However, by about 2:00 in the afternoon the snow softened up enough to have a really great run down to Pebble Creek. The summer trail is being used now and there are a lot of bare spots. We put our skies and snowboards on again below Panorama Point and had a rather bumpy cratered ride (sun cups) down to a point close to the parking lot. Bottom line is, if you go make sure the sun will come out that day enough to soften up the snow (corn snow and icy spots) unless of course we get more snow up higher. Pray for snow!