Mount Rainier, Finally

Hey-- I located a picture of Mount Rainier!

One interesting thing about Mt Rainier is, it's absoutely huge but you can only see it from certain parts of the city. So you'll forget about it until you turn a corner one day and say to yourself, Hey! How'd that big mountain get over there? like it was a mushroom or something that wasn't there yesterday.

The Old Disappearing Mountain Trick. Sort of like the Old Jedi Mind Trick, only different, as your Aunt Deb would say. But you have to admit it's pretty neat how an entire mountain almost three miles high can duck out of sight like that.

Here's another picture of Rainier against the skyline of nearby Tacoma.

That's a big mountain.

Rainier also has a bunch of glaciers on it, which are more-or-less permanently frozen rivers of ice. All over this area you can see lakes and even entire valleys carved out of the landscape by glaciers, as well as huge piles of rocks left behind by them. So where did all those the glaciers go? Back for more rocks, I guess. But there are still some sneaking around Rainier, like mile-wide, menacing Popsicles.

As I mentioned earlier Rainier is a volcano, and they say it's extinct. But what I want to know is, if the volcano is so dead, how come they still have signs like these on all the roads around it?

So that's what we have here in Seattle: A supposedly dead giant extinct volcano covered with mile-wide Popsicles...and one that sneaks around and jumps out at people when they least expect it. And might erupt at any time. Yikes. I bet you don't have any of those in California! (Actually you do. Well, volcanoes and glaciers, anyway. Ask your dad.)