An emperor among lesser mountains

Profound natural beauty at Mt. Rainier National Park

The White River in Mt. Rainier National Park wasn’t white but a chalky pale beige, like caffe latte with too much milk. The river bounded over its bed of boulders with a pressured roaring even at the height of summer. Water so recently released from its glacier prison couldn’t wait to get out into the world, carrying the silt of a mountain’s roots. 

I stood on a bank and observed that the path of the water was much wider than the current level, striated with the scars of older, heavier floods. The waterway was studded with massive sharp-edged rocks. Snarls of fallen logs were reduced by the riverbed’s scale to the dimension of toothpicks.

I had only to tip my head to take in the sharply-drawn, fresh-cut mountains. They raked the sky with edges too new to be blunted by erosion; a window into the geologic processes that shaped a younger Earth.

 Mount Rainier itself loomed over the entire park from every angle, a magnificent pointed peak dressed in blinding white robes, a brooding emperor presiding over lesser mountains. Clouds came up in the afternoon to snag on the peak’s highest point like scarves tossed into the blue air. These textured mantillas gave the appearance of an eruption taking place; a prescient, persistent illusion that reminded us that this mountain was a live volcano.