What?! Mt. Rainier is gone?! How can a 14,400-foot monster mountain just disappear? Mt. Rainier is the 21st tallest mountain in the world! How can it simply not be there? What kind of shenanigans are going on here?
Well, I’ll tell you … on today’s drive up to Mt. Rainier to show it to friends of mine, that mountain was definitely a no-show. It was nowhere to be seen.
Truth-be-told, Mt. Rainier is famous for hiding inside clouds, so much so that unless you know it’s there, you wouldn’t know it was there. That might sound funny, but it’s true. There are no mountains or mountain ranges around Mt. Rainier, it stands alone, so it gathers any and all clouds in the area and swaddles itself in those clouds so much that you would swear there is no mountain there. This happens so often in fact, that when Mt. Rainier is NOT covered in clouds, those of us who live in the Pacific Northwest are commonly heard to say “hey, the mountain was out today, did you see it?” It really is unusual to see Mt. Rainier with no clouds around it, in spite of all the photos on the internet to the contrary.
So … not long ago, when my friends and I drove away from my home on this one particular morning, we could see sun shining on Mt. Rainier, clear as a bell. We were overjoyed. What a great day for a drive up to Mt. Rainier, and a great day for great views. In a couple of hours, once we got up to Paradise Lodge/Inn about 1/3 of the way up to the top Mt. Rainier, this is what we expected to see …
Instead, about half way there on the drive up there, we found this instead …
Nothing … absolutely nothing but big fluffy white clouds. Even after we got all the way up to Paradise (about 5,400 feet up the side of the mountain), we still couldn’t see the mountain. Except for the fact that I knew absolutely that the mountain was there, we would have sworn it wasn’t there. We couldn’t see any part of it. My friends kept joking that there really wasn’t a mountain there at all, that it was all a ruse by those of us who live in the State of Washington in order to get tourists to come here and pay money.
Hey, not a bad idea. 🙂 Except that there really is a mountain there, honest, I swear.
But, this day, without a mountain to see, what could we do?
Well, there are a number of other things to do up here. In all the years that I’ve been alive and all the times I’ve been up to Paradise, I have never been inside the historic 1917 Paradise Lodge/Inn. So … in we went!
(You’ll notice there are no mountains or blue sky visible in the background in the photos above and below … just white, fluffy clouds.)
Paradise Inn is a very handsome building. And it has definitely withstood the test of time. Check out the links above to read the history of this building, and to find out how the building is currently being used and maintained, and to book an overnight room in the Inn.
I knew this place was old, and had been kept in mostly original condition, but even so I was very impressed when I walked in. Even the piano (below) is original. In 1919, Han Fraehnke, a German carpenter, designed and built much of the interior decorative woodwork. Han also built, by hand, the piano and the 14-foot grandfather clock.
Here are photos below of some of the extraordinary interior woodwork … structural elements and furniture.
The photo below was hanging on the wall inside the Inn, obviously taken during an earlier era. Notice the 14-foot grandfather clock to the left of the fireplace … it’s still there today (two photos above), and it still keeps perfect time.
My friends and I roamed around and ooh-ed and aah-ed and enjoyed the fireplace and all the rest of the ambiance. We looked at old photos, and read some of the history. We agreed it would be a wonderful place to stay, especially in one of the rooms that faces “the mountain”.
The three of us stopped in briefly at the large gift shop across the parking lot from the Inn and enjoyed looking at some of the exhibits there about Mt. Rainier and the area around the mountain, including geology and flora and fauna.
Speaking of geology, one of my friends with me today (Mark) has a college degree in geology. He knows stuff that I don’t even know that I don’t know.
As we were driving back down the hill from Paradise after our visit to the Inn, he started pointing out rocks. Well, I always thought rocks were just rocks, you know. But NO, they are not “just rocks”. There are all manner of special rocks with very particular names and histories all their own.
He talked about basalt columns that are found around Mt. Rainier … the same sort of formations that are found in several places around the world, including the Giant’s Causeway between Ireland and Scotland.
We were in my big white truck, slowly meandering down the road, slowly idling around a bend in the road, and Mark yelled, “THERE! There they are!”
Well, of course, the truck pulled right over and parked itself (it does have a mind of it’s own). And we three people jumped out and trotted across the road so we could get a good close look at basalt columns.
These weren’t the enormously tall basalt columns that can be seen other places around Mt. Rainier … and that can be seen on one full, enormous face of Mt. Rainier near Mowich Glacier. There are a number of basalt columnar formations in the world that are much bigger around (larger diameter) than these were. But these columns that we saw by the side of the road were fascinating. And they likely went down into the ground for a long way! And, they were old, millions of years old.
Here’s a link to a really great video that will give you a quick 2-minute geology lesson about basalt columns.
Click on the photos below to enlarge them, to see what we saw on this day at Mt. Rainier.
How cool was all of that! I sure do love to learn stuff. Now I know (and I hope you do too) just a tad more about this world we live on.
In the end, my friends (Mark & Robin) and I got to see inside historic Paradise Inn with its great old, hand-built piano and grandfather clock. Although we didn’t get to see Mt. Rainier, we got to see the rocks that hold up Mt. Rainier … without those rocks, Mt. Rainier really would disappear.