An emperor among lesser volcanoes

Mt. Rainier National Park is a feast for the senses!

The White River in Mt. Rainier National Park isn’t white: it’s a chalky pale beige like a caffe latte with too much milk. The river bounds over its bed of boulders with a pressured roaring, even at the height of summer.

Water so recently released from its glacier prison can’t wait to get out into the world, carrying the silt of a mountain’s roots wherever it might end up. 

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

There is an elemental feel about Mt. Rainier National Park’s  sharply-drawn, fresh-cut mountains. They rake 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 looms over the entire park from wherever you look, a magnificent pointed pe…