Myrtle Falls below Mount Rainier
— the small fall the mountain stands behind.
Not only on a wall.
“Edith Creek tumbles about seventy-two feet at the edge of the Paradise meadows. The Skyline Trail crosses just below it on a small footbridge, and from there the cascade and the mountain line up. That is the photograph almost everyone takes. The meadows below the falls turn pink in late July when the paintbrush is up. By September the water is lower and the basalt steps show through. The walk from the Paradise visitor center is short, less than half a mile, and almost everyone makes it down at least once.
Myrtle Falls below Mount Rainier, 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.
Myrtle Falls is a seventy-two-foot cascade on Edith Creek at the edge of the Paradise meadows on the south flank of Mount Rainier, inside Mount Rainier National Park. The viewpoint sits at about 5,400 feet of elevation, less than half a mile from the Henry M. Jackson Memorial Visitor Center along the Skyline Trail. The vantage from the small footbridge below the falls is one of the most photographed in the Pacific Northwest, because the 14,410-foot summit of Rainier rises directly behind the cascade. The Paradise River collects the run-off from Edith Creek and carries it down toward the Nisqually River drainage and Puget Sound.
The cascade is fed by Edith Creek, which drains a series of small tarns and seeps off the Paradise Glacier above. The water stays cold through August, because it leaves the glacier and reaches the falls within a few hours. In July and early August the volume is enough to fill both basalt steps and throw mist back over the footbridge. By late September the creek thins and the lava bones of the bench show through. The U.S. Geological Survey lists Myrtle Falls as one of more than a hundred named cascades inside Mount Rainier National Park.
The Paradise meadows below Myrtle Falls hold one of the largest subalpine wildflower communities in the Cascades. Peak bloom usually arrives the last week of July through mid-August, with magenta paintbrush, lupine, and avalanche lily layered against the dark conifers of the Tatoosh Range to the south. The Park Service estimates the meadows host more than a hundred species of native wildflowers across a single season. By late September the meadows go red and amber; by November the road past Longmire is often the only way in, depending on snow and avalanche conditions.