Mount Rainier National Park United States

Legendary

The park preserves the area in and around Mt Rainier, a 14,411-foot stratovolcano.

Photo by Mark Gunn

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In the winter of 1971 to 1972, a weather station in this park measured 1,122 inches of snow. That's 93 feet, enough to bury a nine-story building.

It was a world record at the time. The station sits at a spot called Paradise, and Paradise still gets about 50 feet of snow in an average year.

All that snow feeds ice. Mount Rainier carries around 25 named glaciers, more than any other single mountain in the lower 48 states.

The two biggest are Emmons and Carbon. Emmons covers the most ground, about 4.3 square miles, while Carbon holds the most ice and reaches the lowest, ending in a rainforest at just 3,600 feet.

The mountain itself rises 14,411 feet, the highest peak in the Cascade Range. It's an active volcano, though it hasn't erupted in about 1,000 years.

Local tribes had roughly 20 different names for it across seven languages. The most common was Tahoma or Takhoma, meaning "mother of waters."

The English name came from a British sea captain, George Vancouver, in 1792. He named it for his friend Peter Rainier, an admiral who never saw the mountain or set foot in America.

The first recorded climb came in August 1870. A Native guide named Sluiskin led Hazard Stevens and Philemon Van Trump to base camp, and the two men reached the top the next day.

By the 1890s, people were pushing to protect the mountain. The naturalist John Muir climbed it in 1888 and lent his voice to the campaign.

On March 2, 1899, Congress made Mount Rainier the fifth national park in the United States. Today about 10,000 people try to climb it each year, and roughly half make it.

Walk the meadows at Paradise in July or August, when the wildflowers bloom purple, red, and white. Drive to Sunrise, the highest point you can reach by car, for a close view of Emmons Glacier. Follow the Nisqually Vista trail to look down on a glacier grinding rock into powder.