Mt. Rainier News

Mount Rainier National Park got its first full taste of winter earlier this week. While the park has received several dustings of snow already this fall, almost a foot of snow fell at Paradise Monday and Tuesday, according to data from the Paradise weather station. Park visitors need to remember that the road to Paradise is closed each night just past Longmire. It reopens each morning once snowplows have completed removing any new snow.

I am not a camper by nature. Truth be told, I abandoned scouting at age 12, after the sophomore rank of Webelos, because I suffered from an intense childhood phobia of khaki uniforms, convinced they would portend a future career in package delivery. I only stuck with it as long as I did because, in my day, Webelos wore super-chic navy ensembles with a fleur-de-lis patch that always reminded me of a half-peeled banana. Vanity denied me a suitable education in outdoor living skills and all the attendant patches that go with them.

Despite her 24 years as a museum curator, Brooke Childrey was stumped when she first learned about one of the newest additions to the collection at Mount Rainier National Park. It won't fit in a file cabinet with important park papers. It certainly won't sit on a shelf with artifacts uncovered during archaeological digs within the park. Including it among the exhibits at the Henry M. Jackson Memorial Visitor Center, or any other visitor center, just isn't possible.

This summer was the busiest at Mount Rainier National Park since 2003. And apparently many of those visitors brought along their tents, trailers, camp stoves, coolers and sleeping bags, pushing campground use more than 20 percent higher than in 2008. Park statistics show more than 722,000 people visited the park June through August. That's the highest total for the three-month summer season since 730,642 visited the park in 2003. This summer's recreational visits were up 5.6 percent compared with last summer.

Sunrise has some of the best views of Mount Rainier. Unlike Paradise Lodge, the park's more popular south-side visitor center, Sunrise isn't on Mount Rainier itself. Sunrise sits on a ridge that extends away from the volcano, which gives it a special view of the mountain, and is isolated by deep glacial streams to the south and west. Hiking the ridge toward Mount Rainier leads over Burroughs Mountain, where the trail ends with a point-blank view of the two largest glaciers on Mount Rainier -- the Emmons and Winthrop.

What weighs 1,000 pounds, has 4-foot antlers and can frighten away a competitor with the sound of its voice? It’s an elk! Washington state is home to two elk species, the Roosevelt elk and the Rocky Mountain elk.

The names – such as James Longmire, Fay Fuller and P.B. Van Trump – are deeply entwined in the history of Mount Rainier National Park.

Paradise is not only a state of mind at Mount Rainier National Park, it’s a real destination!

 Five years after Mount Rainier took his best friend, Scott Richards can finally tell the story without crying.But that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt."It's still vivid," Richards said. "I'm still sad."

 In 1992 when Mount Rainier National Park hired Stefan Lofgren to keep climbers safe on the upper mountain, his climbing résumé could be summed up in one line:Mount Anderson, Olympic National Park, 7,321 feet.

Conservation groups have petioned the federal government to reduce air pollution from a coal plant that causes haze and poor visibility in Mount Rainier and Olympic national parks.

The good news is that the damage estimate following the historic November 2006 flood at Mount Rainier National Park has been lowered to $27.9 million.There remains, however, an estimated $3.7 million to $7.9 million of work left to be done.Those are some of the figures in a newly released report updating the status of the park’s efforts to recover from the flood.

Cayuse Pass has reopened on Highway 123 on the east side of Mount Rainier within the national park.The 4,675-foot pass was scheduled to reopen Tuesday but that was postponed by a snowstorm that increased the avalanche danger.

He still walks to work, so there's that. And he continues to deal with big egos, with driven colleagues and another type of inveterate climber.

Unlike the last two years, popular recreation areas in Western Washington have escaped serious damage from this week’s heavy rain. Mount Rainier National Park and Gifford Pinchot National Forest were devastated by flooding in 2007. Last year, flooding hit Olympic National Park.