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Good Books For Visiting...Mount Rainier National Park

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Published Date

April 11, 2017

Heading to Mount Rainier National Park? You might find these books interesting/NPS

There's nothing like a good book or two to help you prepare for a national park visit, whether you're looking for some historical background, a trail or two to hike, or interested in the natural resources or local culture. With that in mind, here are a few titles you might consider in preparation of a visit to Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state.

The Ledge, An Adventure Story Of Friends And Survival On Mount Rainier

This title will help you appreciate the dangers that climbers encounter when they climb to the roof of this national park. 

Just hours from their car and the promise of a hot shower, cold beers, and soft beds, Jim Davidson and Mike Price literally plunged into a nightmare that left one of them dead and the other struggling both to understand why his friend died and to figure out how he would save himself.

It took Mr. Davidson nearly a decade to organize his thoughts and feelings to produce The Ledge. The book, written with help from Kevin Vaughan, a finalist for a Pulitzer prize in feature writing, offered Mr. Davidson both an opportunity to search his soul for answers, honor Mr. Price, and come to terms with why he, and not his friend, survived.

Hiking The Wonderland Trail: The Complete Guide To Mount Rainier's Premier Trail

While you'll have to be extremely lucky to pull a permit to hike the 93-mile-long Wonderland Trail around Mount Rainier this summer, this book will help you prepare for when you do land a permit.

Tami Asars' book is a great aid to planning and completing this particular long-distance hike because the Wonderland Trail is no ordinary walk in the woods. That's obvious from the fact that you'll gain, and lose, about 22,000 vertical feet as you circle the dormant volcano. Some days while you're cursing the trail's steep switchbacks will be sunny and mild, others will leave you searching your way in a dense, damp fog, perhaps with a chilly drizzle on your shoulders.

"There's almost nothing more difficult than trying to stay dry when backpacking in consecutive days of rain, and the Wonderland is famous for throwing down the challenge," writes Ms. Asars, who has completed the hike nine times, either in sections or big, go-the-distance gulps. "One time, after five days of deluge, we considered building a canoe out of downed wood to paddle the trail back to Longmire. Thankfully, the skies brightened and we came away with a great story, a couple of rust spots on our elbows, and a few mushrooms growing in our hair."

Mountain Fever: Historic Conquests of Rainier

Published back in 1999, this book covers every pre-1900 ascent, including John Muir's, in some detail, back when it was a three-day expedition to get horses and mules from Yelm to Longmire. The text also serves as a sort of unintentional history of Ashford homesteaders, who often boarded climbers and their stock.

"This book―a collector's item―will be cherished by all who have set foot on the peak and who have been inspired by its distant views."― William O. Douglas

On Mountaineering

Though not dedicated entirely to Mount Rainier National Park, this book profiles seven climbs that Radford C. West took from 1971 through 1980, from the High Sierra to the Canadian Rockies to Mount Kenya. But this is more than a climbing guide. In fact, it reveals the education of West's climbing career. He initially leaned on Marine training to survive and master the skills needed in the peaks. Every trip was an education. And this was back in the early '70s, when people just went and did it, no sponsors, base camps, or radios. They were there for the climbing and the sense of inner-accomplishment, the challenge of a life outdoors in extreme environments.

West is not a big-wall, multi-day bivvy climber. He found that out quickly as a greenhorn in Yosemite, but he had a passion to explore, and go higher. His writing reveals that his boldness had a solid foundation of caution, planning, and cool decision making. When he climbed to the summit in Mount Rainier National Park, for example, he relied on more-experienced mountaineering partners, learning from them every step of the way. In his journal, he describes mapping the steam fumaroles at the summit with a group of geology students, just as a storm rolled in on July 5, 1971:

"I put on my down parka and went out the zippered door where all the snow was blowing in. I could see outside, and the only support for the tent was our ice axes tied to the center cords. All the stakes had been pulled up, and upon inspecting the poles on the far side, I discovered that one had been snapped by the wind."

Exceptional Mountains: A Cultural History Of The Pacific Northwest Volcanoes

One reviewer described this book as, “… why and how we have sanctified these high-altitude mountains.” However, O. Alan Weltzien’s fine effort also casts some wonderful light on aspects of the national parks. 

A century ago, the founders of the National Park Service were perhaps more discerning when identifying landscapes to include in the National Park System than they are today. There was a clamor to add more of the Northwest’s volcanic peaks to the National Park System after Mount Rainier, Lassen Volcanic, and Crater Lake parks were created. But Stephen Mather and Horace Albright, the director of the Park Service and his deputy, were not easily swayed, notes Mr. Weltzien.

“Many people from Seattle to Portland were urging us to make national parks out of every volcanic mountain from Mount Baker to the California border. Mather and I agreed we couldn’t make every peak a park and didn’t have time to inspect them all,” Albright recalled later in life.

He also noted that, “We declined to consider … Mount Hood, Mount Baker, Mount Shasta … and many other beautiful areas because they did not measure up to what we regarded as national park standards or had too much commercial development or too many inholdings, or because the cost was prohibitive considering what Congress would give us.”

Comments

I think many NPT readers would also enjoy A Year In Paradise. Author Floyd Schmoe, Rainier's eventual first Naturalist and one of the first in the NPS, originated the widely imitated Nature Notes publication for visitors.  He and his bride spent the winter of 1920 snowbound at the Paradise Inn as caretakers; must have been quite the honeymoon!
http://www.mountaineersbooks.org/A-Year-in-Paradise-P136.aspx
http://npshistory.com/nature_notes/mora/nn-intro.htm


Sunrise to Paradise: The Story of Mount Rainier National Park by Ruth Kirk (the Amazon listing mistakenly has it by Kirk Ruth [wry g]) is a wonderful, well-illustrated history of the park.  https://www.amazon.com/Sunrise-Paradise-Story-Rainier-National/dp/029597...

Also seconding Tahoma's rec of the Schmoe book.

If you really want to learn more about the park and its history, the Tacoma Public Library's Northwest Room at the downtown branch has a huge collection of out-of-print and other resources as well.


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