Mount Rainier National Park
— — a mountain that just appears.
Not only on a wall.
“An ice-capped stratovolcano rising alone above the Cascade foothills, visible from Seattle on the clear days and from Tacoma on most of them. The park holds the mountain and its twenty-five named glaciers, the old-growth forest at Ohanapecosh, and the meadow rim above Paradise that goes pink in late July. The road up to Paradise climbs out of hemlock into open sky in about an hour from the Nisqually gate. from the studio
Mount Rainier National Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Mount Rainier National Park covers 956 square kilometres of the southern Washington Cascades, established in 1899 as the country's fifth national park. The mountain itself reaches 14,411 feet and carries twenty-five named glaciers, the most of any peak in the contiguous United States. The park is laid out as a ring of developed areas around the summit: Longmire and Paradise on the southwest, Ohanapecosh on the southeast, Sunrise on the northeast, and Mowich Lake on the northwest. The Nisqually entrance, off State Route 706, is the only one open year-round.
Rainier wears its own weather. Mornings, before the marine air pushes up off Puget Sound, the summit usually stands clear and the lower flanks hold a thin white collar of cloud. By mid-afternoon the orographic lift commonly buries the upper mountain. Sunrise at the Sunrise area, on the northeast side at 6,400 feet, takes the first light directly on the Emmons Glacier — the largest glacier by area in the lower forty-eight. Paradise, on the southwest, takes the late-afternoon light onto the Nisqually icefall.
Paradise's subalpine meadows bloom on a tight schedule. Snow generally clears by mid-July; lupine, paintbrush, and bistort peak between late July and mid-August; bear grass and pasqueflower seed-heads carry the look into September. The Naches Peak loop, off Chinook Pass on Highway 410, turns red and gold by late September. Paradise itself averages 53 feet of snowfall a year — one of the snowiest reliably-measured places on Earth — and the road above Longmire closes most winter nights.