Beautiful Mt. Rainier

While we were in Washington State, we took an afternoon to go up to Mt. Rainier National Park.  This gorgeous mountain dominates the eastern skyline.  I find it sad that a lot of locals have told me they don’t even notice it any more.  How can that not take your breath away every single day?  Or at least every day that it’s not shrouded in clouds!

As we headed up, we followed along the glacier fed White River.  There were many snow melt waterfalls.

Some of those waterfalls were right on the road!  Notice the people on the left side to give some reference to how large this was.  Of course Himself had to drive me thru the splash zone…

Every so often there would be a break where you could see Rainier.  We didn’t actually get to go ON Rainier…

…because of this!  The passes were still closed due to deep snow on 5 June.

So we headed along another road that was open.  Amazing, isn’t it?

We found a place to pull over and enjoy a bit of the coolness.  I am 5’9” – to give you some idea of how high that bank is.  Back home in TN they were having record temps right around 100*.  For some reason I got some rude comments when I posted this on my Facebook page!  LOL

Cold or not, he got something started with that snowball in his hand!! 

Melting out.

After seeing this sign…

… I wasn’t so comfortable seeing slumps like this…

…or this!

And it is very cold too!

I found this information board very interesting!

I can’t even imagine!  That is over 600’ more than Mt Saint Helens lost in 1980.  And when you’re figuring volume… that is a lot more.

Here’s a video of a rockslide on Rainier just 3 weeks after we were there. It is incredible. Make sure you watch at least 45 seconds and notice the rock/mud flow the kids zoomed in on. They recorded for almost 3 minutes of a decent rock slide. Now imagine 2000’ feet of mountain going down…

Uff-da!