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Mount Rainier from Burroughs Mountain
Emmons Vista presents a sense of the immensity of the volcano. A mantle of ice shrouds the great dome of the Mountain. Here you can see the largest glacier in the contiguous United States, the Emmons Glacier. The 25 named glaciers on the Mountain cover about 34 square miles, more than on all the other Cascade volcanoes combined.
Mount Rainier, at 14,410 feet elevation, soars into the upper atmosphere to disturb eastward flowing floods of marine air, resulting in spectacular cloud formations. In a sense, the Mountain, often cloaked in fog, mist or showers, makes its own weather. Clouds bring prodigious amounts of rain to the lower slopes and correspondingly record-setting snowfalls on the mid-slopes. Paradise, on the south flank of the Mountain, receives an average 680 inches of snowfall annually. The winter of 1971-1972 brought 1122 inches of snowfall on Paradise. The summit often projects above the cloud layers, and precipitation usually drains moisture from storm clouds before they reach the summit. Consequently less snow falls there. In the middle elevations, all of each winter's snowfall melts each summer, but very little snow melts at the summit. Each succeeding winter adds more snow to the permanent snowpack of this alpine glacial system.