Panzer Leader and the Red Menace
by Robert Von Cocktail
Category: Fiction

UPS AND DOWNS AROUND RAINIER tells the story of a family hike around Mount Rainier on the 93-mile Wonderland Trail. It describes the planning and preparation for it, the pleasures and difficulties experienced on the trail, and the satisfaction provided in coping with the challenge. These provide the plot. Themes of the story are the family's earnest efforts to achieve a goal they have set for themselves and how these efforts are reinforced by planning and perseverance. Everyone in the story is realistically challenged by the deprivations and rigors of the hike. With occasional humor to overcome discouragement, they all grow a little from the experience. The book is factual in content, fictional in form. Based on several circuits of the Wonderland Trail by the author's family, blended into one fictional hike, the story has verisimilitude. Informational writing about the biological, geological, and historical facts cast in conversational form adds interest and significance.