r, the loftiest volcano within the boundaries of the United
States, one of our greatest mountains, and certainly our most imposing
mountain, rises from western central Washington to an altitude of 14,408
feet above mean tide in Puget Sound. It is forty-two miles in direct
line from the centre of Tacoma, and fifty-seven miles from Seattle, from
both of which its glistening peak is often a prominent spectacle. With
favoring atmospheric conditions it can be seen a hundred and fifty miles
away.

North and south of Rainier, the Cascade Mountains bear other snow-capped
volcanic peaks. Baker rises 10,703 feet; Adams, 12,307 feet; St. Helens,
9,697 feet; Hood, 11,225 feet, and Shasta, 14,162 feet. But Rainier
surpasses them all in height, bulk, and majesty. Once it stood 16,000
feet, as is indicated by the slopes leading up to its broken and
flattened top. The supposition is that nearly two thousand feet of its
apex were carried away in one or more explosive eruptions long before
history, but possibly not before man; there are Indian traditions of a
cataclysm. There were slight eruptions in 1843, 1854, 1858, and 1870,
and from the two craters at its summit issue many jets of steam which
comfort the chilled climber.

This immense sleeping cone is blanketed in ice. Twenty-eight
well-defined glaciers flow down its sides, several of which are nearly
six miles long. Imagining ourselves looking down from an airplane at a
great height, we can think of seeing it as an enormous frozen octopus
sprawling upon the grass, for its curving arms of ice, reaching out in
all directions, penetrate one of the finest forests even of our
northwest. The contrast between these cold glaciers and the luxuriantly
wild-flowered and forest-edged meadows which border them as snugly as so
many rippling summer rivers affords one of the most delightful features
of the Mount Rainier National Park. Paradise Inn, for example, stands in
a meadow of wild flowers between Rainier's icy front on the one side and
the snowy Tatoosh Range on the other, with the Nisqually Glacier fifteen
minutes' walk away!

The casual tourist who has looked at the Snowy Range of the Rockies from
the distant comfort of Estes Park, or the High Sierra from the
dining-porch of the Glacier Point Hotel, receives an invigorating shock
of astonishment at beholding Mount Rainier even at a distance. Its
isolation gives it enormous scenic advantage. Mount Whitney of the
Sierra, our loftiest summ