22 OUR NATIONAL PAEKS. 



VI 

 THE MOUNT RAINIER NATIONAL PARK 



Special Characteristic: Complicated Glacial System. Flowing from One Peak 



IN the northwestern corner of the United States rises, from the 

 Cascade Mountains, a series of extinct volcanoes ice-clad from 

 summit to foot the year around. Foremost among them, counting 

 from south to north, are Mount Shasta in California ; Mount Hood in 

 Oregon; Mount St. Helens, Mount Adams, Mount Rainier and Mount 

 Baker in Washington. Once, in the dim ages when America was 

 making, they blazed across the sea like huge beacons. Today, their 

 fires quenched, they suggest a stalwart band of Knights of the Ages, 

 helmeted in snow, armored in ice, standing at parade upon a carpet 

 patterned gorgeously in wild flowers. 



Easily chief of this knightly band is Mount Rainier, a giant towering 

 14,408 feet above tide water in Puget Sound. Home-bound sailors 

 far at sea mend their courses from his silver summit. Travelers 

 over land catch the sun glint from his shining sides at a distance of 

 more than one hundred and fifty miles. His glorious snow-crowned 

 dome is easily visible more than one hundred miles distant. 



This mountain has a glacier system far exceeding in size and im- 

 pressive beauty that of any other in the United States. From its 

 summit and cirques twenty-eight named rivers of ice pour slowly 

 down its sides. There are others unnamed. Seen upon the map, as 

 if from an aeroplane, one thinks of it as an enormous frozen octo- 

 pus stretching icy tentacles down upon every side among the rich 

 gardens of wild flowers and splendid forests of fir and cedars below. 



BIRTH OF THE GLACIERS 



Every winter the moisture-laden winds from the Pacific, suddenly 

 cooled against its summit, deposit upon its top and sides enormous 

 snows. These, settling in the mile-wide crater which was left after a 

 great explosion in some prehistoric age carried away perhaps two 

 thousand feet of the volcano's former height, press with overwhelming 

 weight down the mountain's sloping sides. 



Thus are born the glaciers, for the snow under its own pressure 

 quickly hardens into ice. Through fourteen valleys self-carved in 

 the solid rock flow these rivers of ice, now turning, as rivers of water 

 turn, to avoid the harder rock strata, now roaring over precipices like 

 congealed water falls, now rippling, like water currents, over rough 

 bottoms, pushing, pouring relentlessly on until they reach those parts 

 of their courses where warmer air turns them into rivers of water. 



