y day of visibility for many years. And so it was to Captain
George Vancouver when, first of white men, he looked upon it from the
bridge of the _Discovery_ on May 8, 1792.

"The weather was serene and pleasant," he wrote under that date, "and
the country continued to exhibit, between us and the eastern snowy
range, the same luxuriant appearance. At its eastern extremity, mount
Baker bore by compass N. 22 E.; the round snowy mountain, now forming
its southern extremity, and which, after my friend Rear Admiral Rainier,
I distinguished by the name of MOUNT RAINIER, bore N. (S.) 42 E."

[Illustration: _From a photograph by A.H. Barnes_

SOUTHEAST SLOPE OF MOUNT RAINIER

The winding glacier is the Cowlitz. Gibraltar is the rock on the right
near the summit]

Thus Mount Rainier was discovered and named at the same time,
presumably on the same day. Eighteen days later, having followed "the
inlet," meaning Puget Sound, to his point of nearest approach to the
mountain, Vancouver wrote:

"We found the inlet to terminate here in an extensive circular compact
bay whose waters washed the base of mount Rainier, though its elevated
summit was yet at a very considerable distance from the shore, with
which it was connected by several ridges of hills rising towards it with
gradual ascent and much regularity. The forest trees and the several
shades of verdure that covered the hills gradually decreased in point of
beauty until they became invisible; when the perpetual clothing of snow
commenced which seemed to form a horizontal line from north to south
along this range of rugged mountains, from whose summit mount Rainier
rose conspicuously, and seemed as much elevated above them as they were
above the level of the sea; the whole producing a most grand,
picturesque effect."

Vancouver made no attempt to reach the mountain. Dreamer of great dreams
though he was, how like a madhouse nightmare would have seemed to him a
true prophecy of mighty engines whose like no human mind had then
conceived, running upon roads of steel and asphalt at speeds which no
human mind had then imagined, whirling thousands upon thousands of
pleasure-seekers from the shores of that very inlet to the glistening
mountain's flowered sides!

Just one century after the discovery, the Geological Society of America
started the movement to make Mount Rainier a national park. Within a
year the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the
National Geogr