The Mount Rainier National Park Stamp

Where Mount Rainier is

Mount Rainier, for people who count parks

The name was a favor between officers. George Vancouver sighted the peak from Puget Sound in 1792 and named it for his friend Rear Admiral Peter Rainier, who had fought against the Americans in the Revolution and never set foot near the mountain. The peoples who lived under it already had names, Tahoma and Tacoma among them, and the city of Tacoma waged a decades-long campaign to make one of them official; the federal naming board sided with Rainier, more than once. The older names never left: the Salish word survives on the mountain's glaciers, trails, and half the businesses in the state.

It became the fifth national park on March 2, 1899, signed by William McKinley (after Yellowstone, Sequoia, Yosemite and General Grant) and the first carved out of an existing federal forest reserve. The push came notably from scientists: geologists and geographers wanted the glaciers protected as a natural laboratory, and John Muir lent his weight after climbing the peak in 1888, writing that he had not meant to climb it, but got excited and soon was on top.

The mountain is asleep, not finished. About 5,600 years ago its summit collapsed and slid toward Puget Sound as the Osceola Mudflow, a wall of volcanic mud that buried well over a hundred square miles of lowland, ground that towns and farms now sit on. Smaller lahars have run since, some only centuries ago, which is why valley schools below the mountain hold evacuation drills and sirens stand along the rivers. Rainier is one of the volcanoes international geologists flagged as most worth watching on Earth, less for the odds of eruption than for what sits downstream.

Paradise earned the name honestly. The Longmire family homesteaded mineral springs on the mountain's south side in the 1880s, and the story goes that it was Martha Longmire, coming up into the flower meadows, who said oh, what a paradise. The same meadows hold one of the great weather statistics anywhere: in the winter of 1971-72, Paradise recorded 1,122 inches of snow, over 93 feet: a world record for measured snowfall in a single season that stood for a quarter century. An ordinary winter still drops roughly fifty feet.

Official Mount Rainier park site (nps.gov)

What lives on the mountain

The ice is the headline. Some 25 named glaciers wrap the peak. The Emmons, on the northeast side, is the largest glacier by area in the contiguous United States, and the Carbon reaches the lowest elevation. The Nisqually Glacier has been measured since 1918, one of the longest continuous glacier records in the hemisphere, and the record says what glacier records now say everywhere: retreat, thinning, and meltwater rivers running grey with rock flour.

The meadows live on a six-week clock. Subalpine flower fields at Paradise and Sunrise spend most of the year under snow, then bloom in a compressed rush from late July into August: avalanche lilies pushing up at the edge of the melting drifts, then lupine, paintbrush and bistort in waves. Plants here may take years to recover from a single bootprint, which is why the park is insistent about staying on trail.

The Cascade red fox is the rarity. A small, high-country subspecies found only in Washington's mountains, it hunts the parklands and snowfields alongside the more visible alpine crowd: hoary marmots whistling from the talus, pikas haying all summer, white-tailed ptarmigan going white for winter, and mountain goats on the crags.

The low valleys are the counterweight. Around Ohanapecosh and the rainy Carbon River corner, the park protects old-growth Douglas-fir, hemlock and western redcedar, with the oldest trees near a thousand years, forest that was ancient before Vancouver sailed past. A day here can run from glacier ice to rainforest moss inside twenty miles.

The Mount Rainier designs

Paradise Wildflower Meadow

The subalpine fields on the mountain's south shoulder, which Muir called the most luxuriant and most extravagantly beautiful of the alpine gardens he had seen. For about six weeks from late July the meadows run solid with lupine, paintbrush and avalanche lilies below the summit ice. The rest of the year this scene is buried under one of the deepest snowpacks on Earth.

Reflection Lakes

Small tarns on the road between Paradise and Stevens Canyon where, on a still morning before the wind rises, the entire 14,410-foot mountain stands doubled in the water. It is probably the most photographed view in the park and it is earned honestly: arrive at dawn and the lake is a mirror. The stamp for photographers.

Narada Falls

The Paradise River dropping 188 feet in two tiers over the lip of an ancient lava flow, named in 1893 by a Tacoma climbing party for a branch of the Theosophical Society that took its name from a Hindu sage, chosen to mean pure. A short, steep path leads to a spray-soaked viewpoint below, where afternoon light hangs rainbows in the mist.

How to record your Mount Rainier visit

Mount Rainier, asked and answered