Paradise Revisited - Mount Rainier National Park

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Ski pole chandelier at Paradise we saw on June 29th—Ruth admires the beautiful ingenuity and talent incorporated into the lamps at the Henry M. Jackson Memorial Visitor Center. Park rangers offer guided snowshoe trips at Paradise twice daily Dec. 26 - Jan. 1, and Saturdays & Sundays Jan. into early Apr. — snowshoes provided: first-come, first-served. Artistic evidence of the prodigious amount of snow Mount Rainier wrings from air currents flowing incessantly off the Pacific Ocean, that bury the three-story Inn up to its roof. Above the timber line: gray rocky ridges and pumice fields. The fine dark gray rocks are andesite lava, the coarse light gray rocks are Tatoosh granodiorite (calcium-rich granite).
Myrtle Falls on Edith Creek by Paradise Inn, at the highest and most prominent peak in the Cascade Range: Mount Rainier stands nearly 3 miles higher than lowlands to the west, and 1˝ miles higher than adjacent mountains. High on Mt. Rainier stands an extravagant old lodge called Paradise Inn, a national historical site hotel, built in 1917, and aptly named for its stunning views of the wilderness. Such lovely ancient tall trees in beautiful old-growth groves (some stands 1,000 or more years old) and marvelous (cloud-cloaked) mountain views...some of the park's alpine heather communities have persisted for up to 10,000 yrs. Mature forests with noble fir (Abies procera), Tannenbaum ("fir tree") of the Northwest. These tall, beloved Christmas trees could well be "Brian-Tannen”, the masculine name of Celtic origin, Brian (Bryan), meaning "strong, noble, high".
Magenta paintbrush (Castilleja parviflora), of five species of paintbrush in the Park—and one of the most showy—is endemic and plentiful throughout the Cascade Mountains from Mount Rainier south to the Three Sisters vicinity. Pink mountain heather (Phyllodoce empetriformis) blooms; intense summer sunlight brings forth some of the most breathtakingly beautiful wildflower meadows on earth, surpassing perhaps in sheer color, number of species, and luxuriance of growth all other alpine regions of the world. Close cousin to the white-blossoming Avalanche Lily, the Glacier Lily's yellow flowers gloriously transition the harsh wonderlands of winter into the cool lushness of summer. Stunned by the flowery expanses of Paradise, currently world-famous for its awe-inspiring views and exquisite wildflowers like delicate Partridge Foot (Luetkea pectinata), Martha — James Longmire's daughter-in-law — is said to have exclaimed, "This must be what Paradise is like!"
The largest tree native to Washington, the Douglas-Fir, is not a true fir. Mature trees have thick, deeply furrowed bark and 2˝ to 4-inch cones with long pitchfork bracts. Needles that cling to the twigs long after the conifer is chopped down makes this an excellent Christmas tree. Mt. Rainier National Park preserves over 235,000 acres of remarkable alpine scenery: vast expanses of dense pristine old-growth forests, mostly Douglas-fir, western hemlock, and western red cedar, havens of grandeur and peace. View from Glacier Bridge up toward the Nisqually Glacier. Valleys that radiate from the mountain are of glacial origin, broad at their lower ends, but approaching the mountain becoming more narrow and their sides more precipitous. Joe—& Jay & Tim—took us everywhere we wanted to go.
Marvelous mountain wonderland of tremendous dazzling snowfields & austere glaciers interspersed with breathtaking subalpine flower meadows & dense forests in volcanic soils. Mount Rainier is relatively young in geologic terms, forming about 500,000 years ago in the Cascade Range, that was volcanically active for millions of years due to its location at the western edge of the North American tectonic plate. We shivered through a picnic at (not so) Reflective Lakes on Mt. Rainier, part of the thousand-volcano Ring of Fire with its earthquake faults surrounding—and shrinking—the Pacific Ocean. Reflection Lakes to cloud-covered Mt. Rainier, one of the stratovolcanos, steep sided cones composed of thousands of ash & lava layers, from erupting a predominant rock type—andesite—during their million-year current life spans.

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