My first cruise through Mt. Rainier National Park followed the typical tourist route from Hwy 12, White Pass, entering the Park at the Stevens Canyon entrance, thence up to Paradise Lodge, and down to the southwest entrance at Longmire, then out of the Park to nearby Ashford-- home of the Whittakers' Rainier Guide Service..... The time of day was midday, which generally is a time of day avoided by serious photographers. The summit was beginning to build up a cloud cap, which is why the right portion of the summit has the appearance of being fuzzy. The lake in the foreground is the main member of the aptly-named Reflection Lakes group, and lies at 4,854 feet altitude. You can glimpse patches of snow in the trees across the lake.
Photographer's Notes: Mt. Rainier is deceptively large and showy, but can be quite difficult to capture via the camera-- and this holds true especially for digital cameras, which have a limited ability to capture brightly-lit, very high contrast scenes like the one above. My image above required the digital compositing of two separate images to deal with the contrast problems.
Below is an image looking up the canyon of Stevens Creek from about 4,500 feet. The Paradise/Cowlitz Glaciers lie in the headwaters of Stevens Creek..... I like this image for its use of black and white conversion to improve an otherwise mediocre color image.... Little Tahoma is prominent on the right skyline. Its peak reaches 11,138 feet altitude. In fact, Little Tahoma is nearly identical in height to Oregon's highest peak, Mt. Hood.... Little Tahoma would be Washington's second highest peak if Mt. Rainier were to vanish, and in this image of tiny-looking Little Tahoma, one gains new appreciation for the sheer size of 14,400 foot Rainier! (link to my Mt. Hood pages)
Famed climber Willi Unsoeld, a Northwest native son, met his end on Mt. Rainier in 1987, when an avalanche swept him away. He is most known for making the first ascent of Mt. Everest's West Ridge during the ground-breaking American expedition of 1963.
Look for additional Mt. Rainier images to be posted over the next few months. Below is the first of those, taken on September 30th, high above Paradise Lodge and the Visitor Center. I title it "Huckleberry Flame."
