Rainier

How many skylines feature something vertical and not man-made.. you know, like a volcano. The 14,400 foot Rainier looms just to the right of the view from Kerry Park and is every bit a part of the Seattle cityscape as the Space Needle. Roughly 75 miles away, it looks like it could eat downtown. That is assuming you can see it (something so big tends to get lost in the clouds).

Because of those clouds, I wasn't able to actually see Rainier from the ground until my third day there. We had again woken up early with plans to drive south towards the mountain and hike up a small portion of it. The weather in Seattle was overcast with little visibility, but things were supposed to clear up by midday so we took the chance and loaded up. For almost the entire duration of the drive to, my friend kept pointing straight ahead saying, 'if those clouds weren't there, she'd be all over the windshield.' Little by little, the sky started to show more and more blue. Still no Rainier, although the alpines were back and creating some tunnel vision as we got closer. Finally, with green all around and blue up above, this big white thing came into view. I'll put it like this: there's 'impressive' and there's 'holy shit..'

We parked n hiked about a mile up at the Sunrise area, along with a few hundred other visitors (note: at least on the weekend, unless you get there early in the morning, you'll save time parking in one of the side lots before the main one). The (paved) trail was trafficked with everyone from 5 to 75 years old, which wasn't how I had pictured it, but the surrounding scenery nullified any complaints whatsoever. Looking up at Rainier from that relatively close distance is still hard to describe. Foreign and beautiful. And big.

I would later get a view from over Lake Washington (every bit worth the hype) and then from the window seat one more time on my flight back home (along with those three other peaks I had originally mistaken for Rainier, which my friend told me were likely Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens and Mount Hood). It's pretty wild to see four volcanoes from that perspective just sitting there all together, hanging out. A great last frame for a memorable first trip to the Pacific Northwest.