Mount Rainier

This weekend Anya and I spent a day at Mount Rainier; check out the pictures here.

Mount Rainier is a 14,410 foot high volcano about 60 miles from Seattle. From any part of the city with a view south on a clear day, it's a prominent feature on the horizon. Even though Seattle has views of mountains on both sides of it (the Cascades in the east and the Olympics in the west), Mt Rainier is so big that people who live here simply call it "The Mountain."

The pictures don't really do it justice; when you're nearby it's so massive that it's difficult to believe it's only one mountain. Its immensity dwarfs any other mountains I've ever seen; there are places where the land rises more than 13,000 vertical feet in a matter of only a few miles.

Since it sticks out far above all the other nearby mountains into the wet wind coming off the Pacific, it (like the other nearby volcanoes: Baker, Hood, Adams, and St Helens) gets clobbered with snow in the winter. We visited on June 2nd and it was sunny and about 70 degrees; check out our pictures for the ones where the snow was still almost 9 feet deep on the side of the road. This ample precipitation means that it's the most heavily glaciated peak in the lower 48 states, and it remains snow-capped throughout the summer.

The mountain is in Mount Rainier National Park, one of the oldest and most frequently visited national parks. It's also a historic site because of the prevalence of 1920's & 30's era log buildings known as 'parkitecture.'

During summer weekends (the park is only open from May - October), it gets very crowded with people driving along the highway to enjoy the scenery. The cool thing that we discovered is that it's easy to escape the crowds: since most people never go far from the highway or the main visitors centers, you can take even a short walk into the forest and have a completely different experience from the average visitor.

We walked along a trail (see the pictures at the end of the set) that climbed along the Van Trump Creek; our destination was Comet Falls, a 300 foot waterfall 2 miles distant and 1200 vertical feet up from the trailhead. We were turned back by icy conditions on a steep, exposed slope shortly before the falls, but not before seeing giant trees, raging rapids, and dozens of small waterfalls. We both definitely want to return someday to go all the way to the large falls.

For anyone still reading my ravings: if you're coming to visit us this summer and are even remotely interested in doing something outdoorsy, we'd be happy to take you to Rainier.