[Chaw-Kuh]

Like ok so first, you don't just "see it in X place on the horizon", because the PNW is perpetually cloudy or hazy, so you forget it fooken exists for months at a time and then suddenly BAM, MOUNTAIN.

Second, the way north-south highways fishtail around creates this very unsettling illusion where it seems to drift from the left side to the right side of the road and back again. It only takes a few degrees of road curvature for it to happen, so it seems like you're driving straight and yet... there it goes again...

Finally, and I cannot stress this enough, we all talk about how it will kill us all some day like you might talk about a particularly interesting cactus in your neighborhood. Oh yeah, one of these days, pyroclastic mud flow, pow, there goes Tacoma, and like 8 other towns, also the peninsula will be inaccessible for months when it finally goes.

Mount Rainier National Park Archives courtesy Vicknair Album Photo of the Nisqually Entrance Arch in 1923.

The Nisqually Entrance has been the main entrance to the park at least since the Nisqually Road, originally called the “Government Road”, was first surveyed in 1903 and went as far as Longmire. Nisqually Entrance is the longest operating entrance station in the National Park Service and remains the busiest entrance to Mount Rainier National Park. Welcoming visitors to the entrance is a log portal, called the Nisqually Entrance Arch, that was first constructed in 1911. The current 1973 entrance arch is a reconstruction of a 1930s reconstruction of the original 1911 arch at the same location. The workmanship, materials, and feeling of the reconstruction are completely consistent with the original arch and the Nisqually Entrance Arch remains a historic structure in the park’s National Historic Landmark District.

NPS Photo of the snowy arch in February 2019 (left) and NPS/B. Burnett Photo of the entrance arch in August 2019 (right).

Visitors have been stopping at the entrance arch to take photos for over a century – have you?