The Mountain is Out (Again)

Click above image for (much) larger version (Flickr photo by Stephbu).

To have a look at the general view of our climbing route from Camp Schurman at Steamboat Prow to the summit, GO HERE and hold your mouse over the image to display landmarks.

Years ago (when The Kingdome still existed), Seattleite Bruce Barcott wrote an homage to Mount Rainier that tried to capture its mystique. I'm not sure that it does, completely, but it comes close (excerpt):

When it rises like a misshapen moon over downtown Seattle, the mountain entrances me, arrests my attention, and rouses my imagination; it makes me weave on wet highways.

On early mornings Rainier wakes above siesta-rate motels on Highway 99, above the waterfront's dromedary cranes and the grey dimple of the Kingdome, above the Space Needle and the Columbia Tower and Tokyo-bound 747s and everything that lives and everything that doesn't, as far as the eye can see. Rainier wakes higher than most of the air we breathe. The sight of it has nearly killed me. More than once its spell has been broken by the headlights of an oncoming car bearing down on my southbound self speeding along the northbound lane. The mountain never appears in the same place with the same face twice. It possesses a Cheshire talent for appearing and disappearing at will. From the highest hill it may lie shrouded in mist, only to show itself an hour later from the middle of Puget Sound. People who have lived in the Pacific Northwest all their lives still stop and stare when Rainier reveals itself. The moment crackles with the thrill of Nature being caught unaware, like seeing an eagle snatch a sockeye from the Sound. On clear winter days the Olympic and Cascade mountains flank the trough of Puget Sound like a fence of whitecapped waves. We've got mountains like Iowa's got flat. And yet the local vernacular admits only one "Mountain," and when Rainier rises we tell each other, "The Mountain is out." Mount Rainier is at once the most public symbol of the Pacific Northwest and its most sacred private icon. A friend once disclosed that she says a prayer whenever she sees it. A stranger I met on its high southern flank told me, "You must love this mountain as much as I do," but his reverent tone of voice told me I couldn't. Lou Whittaker, who has climbed Rainier more than one hundred fifty times, told me about returning home from a Himalayan expedition and catching sight of the mountain and feeling it snap his breath clean away.

Like rain and rivers and trees, the mountain is a continuous presence in our lives, but in our psychological landscape it occupies a place separate and greater than the forests and falling water. We look at Rainier and feel love for a mountain, if such a thing is possible. The mountain inspires in us a feeling akin to spiritual awe: reverence, adoration, humility. We look at Rainier and regard the vastness of God; yet we look at it and claim it as our own. This strange relationship we have with the mountain is romantic, uninformed, even presumptuous. Rainier is a mountain few of us know.

"The Mountain is Out," By Bruce Barcott (complete version)


[Flickr photo by mraaronmorris]