A Crown of Glaciers
Near Ashford, Washington
Look at the white slopes of Mount Rainier and you are looking at the largest single mountain glacier system in the lower forty eight states. Rainier is capped by roughly two dozen named glaciers, holding more ice than any other Cascade volcano. The Emmons Glacier, on the northeast face, has the largest surface area of any glacier in the contiguous United States, spreading across more than four square miles.
The Carbon Glacier, tucked into a deep shaded valley on the north side, is the thickest, plunging some seven hundred feet deep, and it flows to one of the lowest elevations of any glacier in the lower states, its snout reaching down into old growth forest. These rivers of ice are not just scenery. They are the source of the White River, the Nisqually, the Carbon, the Cowlitz, and other streams that water the whole region, the reason Native peoples called the mountain the mother of waters.
But the ice is shrinking. In recent years scientists have watched several of Rainier's smaller glaciers thin, retreat, and in a few cases vanish entirely, a slow motion record of a warming world written across the mountain's shoulders.
