Mount Rainier

Mount Rainier is an enormous active volcano in the Cascade Range of Washington, rising to 14,411 feet (4,392 m) — the highest peak in the Cascades and the most heavily glaciated mountain in the contiguous United States. On clear days it looms over Seattle and Tacoma some 60 miles away, so dominant that locals simply call it "the Mountain." Its broad, ice-covered cone is visible across the whole Puget Sound region.

Rainier carries more than two dozen glaciers, the largest on any peak in the lower 48, and those ice fields make it a serious hazard as well as a spectacle: a future eruption could melt the ice into fast-moving mudflows, or lahars, that would threaten the valleys and towns below. For now the volcano sleeps, its wildflower meadows and glaciers protected within Mount Rainier National Park.

• Washington
  The Evergreen State, the wet and dry sides of the Cascades located in
• The Cascade Range
  A chain of volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest part of
• Mount Rainier National Park
  Wildflower meadows beneath a great Cascade volcano protected as
• The Pacific Northwest
  The mild, green, forested upper-left corner related