This could easily be confused with *actual* paradise!  However, I’m referring to the Paradise visitor center and trailhead at Mt. Rainier National Park!  Our original weekend plans included a trip to Hurricane Ridge in the Olympics instead, however in a strange turn of events, they have almost zero snow!  The visitor’s center rents snowshoes, but when we got up there, the snow was so well packed we decided to just not bother with them and went out with just hiking shoes instead.

I’m not even sure what trail we were actually on, but we spent so much time taking pictures, playing in the snow, and throwing snowballs at each other we only made it to the first real ridge before we decided we were tired and headed back to the truck!

As usual, I took entirely too many photos and split them up into different posts.  Because the snow is so bright and it was cloudy/foggy most of the time, there wasn’t a lot of bright color to be had.  I cut my losses and converted a lot of my photos to black and white.  The snow has a lot of opportunities to use negative space and create patterns and shapes out of the trees.  I had a lot of fun!