Mount Rainier is the largest and most dangerous volcano in the United States of America. The summit reaches 14,410 feet above sea level, so high and superimposing that it creates its own weather. When our Baha'i friends Shaun and Leila, new to Seattle, asked to join us on one of our excursions here George and I jumped at the chance to show them the remarkable beauty of Mt. Rainier.
We met at the visitor center at Sunrise at 10:30, and spent the next 6 hours hiking along the Berkeley Park trail, one of the more strenuous hikes offered at Sunrise. (At 6,400 feet above sea level Sunrise is the highest point in the park that you can reach by vehicle.) We completed a 8 mile hike, including an extension through adjacent snow fields and meadows, along the Sourdough Ridge and the Northern Loop. 
There is a 1200 foot elevation gain with the hike, which alternated with moderate descents into the Berkley meadows. The Berkley meadows are astoundingly beautiful this time of year - lupine, potentilla, pasque flower, Indian paintbrush, purple aster, penstemin, phlox, and an abundance of low-lying shrubs. 
We walked slowly, engaging in conversation along the way. This hike which was 6 hours, seemed like 3, because the conversation was so rich. We enjoyed getting to know our new friends, who have recently moved here from Haifa, Israel. Leila and I got to know each other from blogging. While on the trail, I told her of my recent library acquisitions, a book about Georg Steller and Vitis Bering up in Alaska, "Steller's Island" by Dean Littlepage, and another "The Measure of a Mountain - Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier" by Bruce Barcott. The latter has been a delightful acquaintanceship with the nuiances of the mountain, the landscape and its visitors."...the Rainier he finds is a marvelous complex of bearded hemlocks and old-growth firs, ethereal formations of rock and snow, thinning air, and fractured glaciers steadily grinding the mountain down."
"Its snowfields bristle with bug life, and its marmots gnaw on rocks to keep their teeth from turning into tusks. Rainier rumbles with seismic twitches and jerks - 130 earthquakes annually -- and threatens to heave an unstoppable wall of mud down its slopes."Barcott details the dormant nature of Mt. Rainier, saying "The more scientists learn about Mount Rainier, the more nervous they become, because in the last few years they've discovered that the danger doesn't lie, as they thought earlier, in a volcanic eruption.
What's got the geologists spooked is the fact that the mountain could collapse at any minute." It has something to do with the movement of the Juan de Fuca and Pacific plates. We had such a good time, that I'll admit that we spent very little time considering this possibility! 
This is one of the last images I took of the mountain as we drove down. The heavy fog was rolling in gentle currants, blanketing the mountain in moisture. We said our goodbye's to Leila and Shaun, then spent two more hours exploring the area around Tipsoo Lake, hiking up to another little lake, where we sat on a huge boulder together, reminiscing about the beauty of the day.
