Rainier May Be Seen In Spotless White, Looking Down Over
The Dark Woods From A Distance Of Fifty Or Sixty Miles, But So High
And Massive And So Sharply Outlined, It Seems To Be Just Back Of A
Strip Of Woods Only A Few Miles Wide.
Mt. Rainier, or Tahoma (the Indian name), is the noblest of the
volcanic cones extending from Lassen Butte and Mt.
Shasta along
the Cascade Range to Mt. Baker. One of the most telling views of it
hereabouts is obtained near Tacoma. From a bluff back of the town it
was revealed in all its glory, laden with glaciers and snow down to
the forested foothills around its finely curved base. Up to this time
(1879) it had been ascended but once. From observations made on the
summit with a single aneroid barometer, it was estimated to be about
14,500 feet high. Mt. Baker, to the northward, is about 10,700 feet
high, a noble mountain. So also are Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens, and
Mt. Hood. The latter, overlooking the town of Portland, is perhaps
the best known. Rainier, about the same height as Shasta, surpasses
them all in massive icy grandeur, - the most majestic solitary
mountain I had ever yet beheld. How eagerly I gazed and longed to
climb it and study its history only the mountaineer may know, but I
was compelled to turn away and bide my time.
The species forming the bulk of the woods here is the Douglas spruce
(Pseudotsuga douglasii), one of the greatest of the western giants.
A specimen that I measured near Olympia was about three hundred feet
in height and twelve feet in diameter four feet above the ground.
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