Mount Rainier National Park

An active volcano looms less than 60 miles from downtown Seattle, its summit buried under more glacial ice than any other single peak in the contiguous United States, and in 1899 Congress made it the fifth national park in the country. Mount Rainier had already drawn mountaineers for decades — the first recorded summit came in 1870 — and the Mountaineers and other Pacific Northwest climbing clubs lobbied hard for federal protection as logging interests pushed into the surrounding old-growth forest. President William McKinley signed the park into law on March 2, 1899.

The mountain carried other names long before Rainier's: Puyallup, Nisqually, Yakama, and other peoples who used its slopes for hunting and gathering called it Tahoma or Tacoma, names tied to treaties signed in 1854 and 1855 in which those nations ceded most of the surrounding land to the United States while retaining treaty rights to fish and gather there that remain legally contested today. Geologists consider Rainier one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the country, not for its lava but for its ice: an eruption could melt enough of its 25 glaciers to send lahars, fast-moving mudflows, through valleys now home to more than 150,000 people.

Paradise, the park's main visitor area, can collect more than 50 feet of snow in a single winter, among the highest totals ever recorded anywhere on earth with regular measurement. Climbers still attempt Rainier's summit by the thousands each year, often using it as a training ground for expeditions to much higher mountains, while hundreds require rescue on its glaciers and crevasse fields.