From a tiny, rural village in the mountains of China’s Anhui province, our young friend Zha Chun recently made her first trip to Mount Rainier National Park. Valerie and I met Chun in Shanghai during the spring of 2017, when I taught a 10-week course at Xing Wei College. An experiment as one of China’s few liberal arts schools, its student exchange program with The Evergreen State College provided us the unique opportunity to live in the world’s largest city—24 million souls.
Chun grew up in Taihu County, Chinese for “Big Lake,” a several hour plane ride west of Shanghai across the iconic Yangtze River. An adventurous young woman, she left her home—and her beloved grandparents—for the city and to study at Xing Wei. She was in my class, Observe Nature, Improve Your English. I wanted to call it Let’s Go Outside and Goof Around, but that would have raised some eyebrows at the Curriculum Committee meeting. The students read portions of Tahoma’s manuscript, adopted “sit spots” on campus, and created nature journals to strengthen their English. They marveled at “so much nature” in the city. I told the class that if anyone ever visited the U.S., I would take them to Mount Rainier.
Late last fall, Chun texted me to say that she’d be attending Evergreen this winter and spring as an exchange student. Shortly after her arrival, she told me how exciting it was to see the mountain from Olympia. It took us a while to coordinate our schedules and find a window of good weather, but in early May, we made Chun’s first trip to Mount Rainier.
She’d experienced snow for the first time during Olympia’s February blizzard that included a 3-day power outage and a week’s cancellation of classes. Fortunately, Chun and her resourceful roommates had plenty of candles and many card games to teach each other. She learned how to make snowballs and snow angels, too.
Despite the snowstorm, nothing could prepare Chun for the snow-covered beauty of the Paradise area on that sparkling May morning. Ever the gamer, she donned snowshoes and followed me up the hill. It was pure joy!
After a couple of hours on the snow and wanting to be careful to avoid the epic sunburn like the one I caused on one of her classmates in Shanghai, we headed down the mountain. We made stops along the Nisqually River at some of my favorite places to let her appreciate its incredible power. At the Longmire Stewardship Campground, we found the delicate and increasingly rare fairy slipper orchid in its usual spot. This is the only location in the park that I know about, and we counted 59 individuals—a record.
Chun’s U.S. escapade ends soon, and she will return to her hometown. Her parents want her to take the security of a government desk job, but her passion is the outdoors and the natural world. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for this bright, intrepid young woman!