The Gazette

MOUNT RAINIER IS
FROZEN
OCTOPUS
MORE THAN
TWENTY
MIGHTY
GLACIERS REACH THEIR
ARMS DOWNWARD
Between
Glaciers
are
Wonderful
Growths of Wild Flowers

A frozen octopus of enormous bulk whose glittering armored body rises three miles into the sky, with twenty or more huge wrinkled arms reaching down among thousands of acres of the most gorgeous and luxuriant wild flowers, to squirt, from each finger tip, a river of ice water into the valley below.

Surely quotation from the Arabian Nights! Or a ghost tale to frighten children on Hallowe'en!

But no, however figurative this is a true statement of an actual fact.

There really exists such an ice armored octopus in these United States.

It is a justifiable description of the most interesting mountain in Uncle Sam's dominions, and perhaps in the world.

Mount Rainier is in the state of Washington, fifty-six miles southwest of Tacoma. It is one of that celebrated range of volcanoes which were supposed to be extinct until, within the year, Lassen Peak broke forth again. Rainier, though supporting one of the most remarkable single peak glacial systems in the world, emits steam from certain crevices, evidence of continued internal heat.

Seen from Tacoma or Seattle the vast mountain appears to rise directly from sea level, so insignificant seem the ridges about its base. Yet these ridges themselves are of no mean height. They rise 3,000 to 4,000 feet above the valleys that cut through them, and their crests average 6,000 feet in altitude. Thus at the southwest entrance to the Mount Rainier National Park, which congress created to protect this natural marvel from private encroachment, the elevation above sea level is 2,000 feet, while Goat Mountain, close by rises to an altitude of 6,045 feet.

But so colossal are the proportions of the great volcano that they dwarf even mountains of this size and give them the appearance of mere foot-hills. In height Rainier is second in the United States only to Mount Whitney.

Mount Rainier stands in round numbers 10,000 feet high above its immediate base and covers 100 square miles of territory. In shape it is not a simple cone tapering to a slender, pointed summit like Fujiyama, the great volcano of Japan. It is rather a broadly truncated mass resembling an enormous tree stump with spreading base and irregular broken top.

Its life history has been a varied one. Like all volcanoes, Rainier has built up its cone with the materials ejected by its own eruptions—with cinders and steam shredded particles and lumps of lava and with occasional flows of liquid lava that have solidified into layers of hard basaltic rock. At one time it attained an altitude of not less than 16,000 feet, if one may judge by the steep inclination of the lava and cinder layers visible in its flanks. Then followed a great explosion that destroyed the top part of the mountain and reduced its height by some 2,000 feet. The volcano was left beheaded, with a capacious hollow crater surrounded by a jagged rim.

Later on this great cavity which measured nearly three miles across from south to north, was filled by two smaller cinder cones. Successive feeble eruptions added to their height until at last they formed together a low rounded dome—the eminence that now constitutes the mountain's summit. The higher portions of the old crater rim rise to elevations within a few hundred feet of the summit and especially when viewed from below, stand out boldly as separate peaks that mask and seem to overshadow the central dome.