National Parks
Portfolio

Cover

Contents

Foreword

Parks vs Monuments

Acadia

Bryce Canyon

Carlsbad Caverns

Crater Lake

General Grant

Glacier

Grand Canyon

Grand Teton

Hawaii

Hot Springs

Lassen Volcanic

Mesa Verde

Mount McKinley

Mount Rainier

Platt

Rocky Mountain

Seqoia

Wind Cave

Yellowstone

Yosemite

Zion

Monuments

National Parks Portfolio

Mount Rainier

GLACIER and WILD FLOWER

PROBABLY no other glacier of large size is so quickly, easily, and comfortably reached as the most striking and celebrated, though by no means the largest, of Mount Rainier's, the Nisqually Glacier. It descends directly south from the snowy summit in a long curve, its lower finger bisecting park like glades of luxuriant wild flowers to within less than a quarter mile of the highway at the Nisqually Glacier Bridge. From Paradise Valley one may hike over a good trail to the moraine that borders the ice and from that point reach the fissured surface of the glacier itself.

The Nisqually Glacier is five miles long and at Paradise Park is half a mile wide. Glistening white and fairly smooth at its shining source on the mountain's summit, its surface here is soiled with dust and broken stone and squeezed and rent by terrible pressure into fantastic shapes. Innumerable crevasses, or cracks many feet deep, break across it caused by the more rapid movement of the glacier's middle than its edges; for glaciers, like rivers of water, develop swifter currents nearer midstream.

Professor Le Conte tells us that the movement of Nisqually Glacier in summer averages, at midstream, about sixteen inches a day. It is far less at the margins, its speed being retarded by the friction of the sides.

Like all glaciers, the Nisqually gathers on its surface masses of rock with which it strews its sides just as rivers of water strew their banks with rocks and floating debris. These are called lateral moraines, or side moraines. Sometimes glaciers build lateral moraines miles long.

The rocks which are carried in midstream to the end of the glacier and dropped when the ice melts are called the terminal moraine. The end, or snout, of the glacier thus lies among a mass of rocks and stones. The Nisqually River generally flows from a cave in the end of the Nisqually Glacier's snout. The river is dark brown when it first appears because it carries sediment and powdered rock.

But this brief picture of the Mount Rainier National Park would miss its loveliest touch without some notice of the wild-flower parks lying at the base and often reaching far up between the icy fingers of Mount Rainier.

"Above the forests," writes John Muir, the celebrated naturalist, "there is a zone of the loveliest flowers, fifty miles in circuit and nearly two miles wide, so closely planted and luxurious that it seems as if nature, glad to make an open space between woods so dense and ice so deep, were econo mizing the precious ground and trying to see how many of her darlings she can get together in one mountain wreath—daisies, anemones, columbine, erythroniums, larkspurs, etc., among which we wade knee-deep and waist-deep, the bright corollas in myriads touching petal to petal. Altogether this is the richest subalpine garden I have ever found, a perfect flower Elysium."

MOUNT ADAMS FROM MOUNT RAINIER—FORTY MILES SOUTHWARD
Photograph by Curtis & Miller

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Last Modified: Mon, Oct 31, 2002 10:00:00 pm PDT
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