Mount Rainier

The summer of 2010, the second time that I lived and worked up at Mount Rainier on the eastern side of the National Park at the Sunrise Day Lodge restaurant and gift shop. At an elevation of 6,400 feet, it’s the highest point that can be reached by a vehicle. The starting and midway point for several trailheads including the Pacific Crest Trail. I was so excited to be back up here again for the summer, up in the wilderness with all the animals, views and plant life.  It was a wonderful experience before and I greatly enjoyed the outdoors, exploring and meeting all the travelers & visitors of the park. Often adventuring with coworkers and solo in these wild lands. In the evenings everybody had to leave the park except for us that worked-lived there. We really got to enjoy the nature of the park to its fullest. It was quiet at night, save for us staff messing around drunk. The ominous mountain with the Emmons glacier looming above.

This season my at the time boyfriend joined the adventure for a summer job. We packed up our modest items into a car and took off up to the mountain. That high up on Mount Rainier, it gets very dark at night, you can see the Milky Way and it really is something to behold. With the park being essentially closed to visitors except for maybe some backpackers that have the special permit to be up that high staying at backpacking spots, the rest of the park was just empty. This was quite a privilege and something I will never forget being able to be that high up having it essentially to ourselves was a treat.  The Milky Way is astonishing it's the brightest at that elevation, it’s actually amazing. You just can't see that from anywhere else, like from down in Seattle or Tacoma.

We were out on some lawn chairs in the parking lot stargazing drinking some beers looking at the sites. As we're looking around, we noticed that there are a bunch of things that you just can’t see from anywhere else, I'm talking about the satellites and space stations. You get used to the flow of the same patterns of movements across the night sky. We pointed out our favorite stars, certain planets we can visualize and landmarks where the lights are coming from the directions of cities below. We were pretty into astrology at this point, I mean how could you not with the view that beautiful you really couldn't ignore it all around you. At this point we were probably a few drinks in, having a good time talking about work and things that were coming up and looking forward to.

I remember being mid-conversation and noticed seeing something that felt out of the ordinary or at least we didn't notice it being in that part of the sky the last time we looked. At first, we were like, oh- cool it's another sort of satellite or something along those lines that just hadn’t come around in orbit yet. The more focused on it we were noticing how it was moving around and how that it seemed to almost navigate around other aspects in the sky.

This was out of the ordinary, most things have the same speed and cadence you could track in your field of vision and know what direction things were heading. However, this came out of nowhere, making us stop our conversation and attempt to theorize what it could be; some sort of new space station, something from Russia or something that just hadn't ever seen come across our aerospace.

 This was a circular light that was making a zigzagging path through the sky, erratically moving around very high up. We couldn't see a lot of detail besides it just being light coming towards us and the light that we could see was very similar to ones on satellites; a whitish yellow. We were becoming a little uncomfortable because of how it was seemly coming towards us in the sky.  I felt like it was maybe almost coming down, like crash landing out of the sky. We kept watching its quick movements in awe as it gradually made its way across the sky south.

We discussed how it couldn't be this, and couldn't be that. Trying to rationalize what we say as it was hard to conceptualize. Looking around to see if anyone else was around that late, who also saw. There wasn't anybody else around and was just a privilege for us. Still feeling a little afraid and in shock.

This wasn't my first time seeing an unidentified flying object, my partner on the other hand, was in disbelief and possibly a little disturbed. Trying to rationalize it to be anything else, throwing out ideas and then instantly rebuking his own ideas because of other things we saw. Agreeing, our perception of this UFO being so far away, it was really hard to tell its size or how much physical space in the sky it was really travelling, but it seemed to leap around from the right side of our vision to the middle to the left side of our vision to the middle back again at speeds that seemed unfathomable.

This caused us to pause, really look each other in the eyes, and acknowledge what we saw was real. For a moment I think we both really wanted it to not be real, just go back to drinking beers and enjoying our night and not having to worry about this existential cat out of the bag. We continued to watch it for what felt like maybe 10 more minutes, no longer trying to think of any other rational ideas of what it could be. Accepting that it had been a UFO, and there was no denying it.

Holding our breath waiting to see if it was going to come down any further, get any closer or if something was going to happen. Asking the void of silence, are we going to have an encounter with this thing. Learning that in times like these the only thing you can do, is just witness it, be a part of the scenario, observe the situation so that maybe later when you're not in shock you can evaluate what you think you saw.