Your first close-up views of Rainier come at historic Longmire, the park's center for winter sports. From there the road steepens, switchbacking past volcanic outcrops and thundering glacial streams. Elevation gains rapidly, the trees thin, and traffic-stopping vistas open up, with Mounts St. Helens, Hood, and Adams incising the horizon. The stark white summit cone of Mount Rainier half fills the sky. Massive Nisqually Glacier chokes a wide cleft in the volcano's flank.
Colorful wildflowers bend in the breeze, filling meadow after meadow with vivid, unexpected color.
And the elegantly rustic Paradise Inn, an enormous stone and log lodge, surveys this wondrous landscape. Even the briefest visit to Mount Rainier demands a walk through the subalpine and alpine meadows of Paradise or Sunrise, filled with wild asters, daisies, orchids, cinquefoil, and heather. Perhaps the most scenic of the many trails that begin at Paradise is Skyline Trail, which climbs through wildflower meadows and across snowfields and scree slopes to Panorama Point. Along the way, look for yellow glacier lilies, marsh marigolds, western anemones, and purple shooting stars. Some of the largest trees in the park many more than 1,000 years old preside over these brooding woodlands.