The day we visited Mount Rainier was cloudy and it never did clear up.  We were disappointed in that because our pictures didn’t turn out as well as we wanted, but the views of the mountain were all we hoped for and more.

As you drive up to Mount Rainier you don’t see the mountain because of the old-growth forests and the hills between you and the mountain.  We were on some switchbacks and at one point we were driving south (away from the mountain) but I saw a hill appear to the north that had some snow on it, so I turned to look more and THERE IT WAS!  It was HUGE!  It was REALLY HUGE and RIGHT THERE!

Jeff couldn’t see it and there was no place to stop for a while, but when we did come to a parking area and got our first real view of the mountain we could only just stare up at it for a few minutes.  It’s over 14,000 ft and nothing else around it is anywhere near that tall so it sticks up there by itself!

We’ve been to Mount Whitney which is higher (highest point in the lower 48 states) but it’s surrounded by other tall mountains and what you see is the mountain range…and also depending on your viewpoint other mountains appear taller quite often.  It detracts from the awesomeness, I feel.

We’ve also seen other mountain peaks that are standing by themselves (Shasta, Lassen, McLaughlin, Baker) but this one was truly impressive!!

One thing I was impressed with is that there are 25 very large glaciers on Mount Rainier.  That’s as many glaciers as there are in the entire Glacier National Park, which is spread out over many miles and many peaks.  One glacier, Nisqually, feeds a very large riverbed full of boulders that you can see in one of the photos below.

Here are the photos we took:

While in Southern Washington we are staying in Chehalis so that we can visit both Mount St. Helens and Mt. Rainer.

We visited Mount St. Helens on a day that started off really cloudy and foggy and when we arrived at the visitors center we were fogged in.  We were concerned that we wouldn’t see anything but the rangers assured us that we would drive up through the fog and then it would be clear.  And, it was!

Mount St. Helens is not a real high mountain at 8,300 ft.  But, the crater…it’s HUGE!  It really did blast out the whole side of the mountain!

Jeff and I were both really impressed and decided that if we had a top 3 list of places we’d been to so far, this is on that list!  (the others are Yellowstone and Carlsbad Caverns).

We were surprised to find that the mountain is not being quiet right now.  It’s growing again!  Inside the huge crater is  dome that is building up and there’s a little amount of steam coming from it that is visible to the naked eye from the Johnston Ridge Observatory a few miles away.  There have been small eruptions since the big one in 1980 as well!  Yipes!!  People in this area talk about eruptions like we talk about earthquakes in Southern California…something to laugh about and maybe be prepared for, but not too scary.

In the pictures below I’ve labeled one that was taken before the eruption, one shortly afterward, and one that we took that shows how much the dome has grown since the eruption.  Also included are several more of the area including the devastation that still exists today for several miles around the volcano due to the ash (as deep as 20 feet in some places) and the downed trees that are still scattered all over the place.  The forests for several miles around are new forests, planted in the 80s to replace all that was totally destroyed when the mountain erupted.