
I thought I knew what these ground squirrels were but I happened to glance through the back of my mammals guide while on this trip and realized there are two kinds of golden-mantled ground squirrels in the Mount Rainier area, the regular kind and the Cascade kind. I’m not sure which one this is yet, after I finish editing all my pictures (or if I finish editing all my pictures) I’ll try and find out.
Some of these squirrels didn’t have a strong black line above the white line, only below, but I don’t know how definitive of an ID mark that is. One thing I do know is that they sure are cute! This one wasn’t too far from the top of the trail where another ground squirrel was trying to steal my food, but this fellow wasn’t interested in me. It would stand on its hind legs and grab as many seed pods as it could, extract the seeds and stuff them into its already full cheeks, then move nearby and repeat repeat repeat until it must have filled its cheeks and sprinted off to the other side of the hill.