Tahoma, the Mountain That Makes Its Own Weather
Near Ashford, Washington
Somewhere ahead of you, when the clouds part, a single mountain fills the whole horizon. Mount Rainier stands roughly fourteen thousand four hundred feet above sea level, the highest peak in the Cascade Range and the most heavily glaciated mountain in the lower forty eight states. But height is only half the story.
This is an active volcano, resting between eruptions, its summit crater still warm with sulfur steam. Long before any settler saw it, the Native peoples of Puget Sound had their own names for it. The Puyallup and Nisqually and other tribes speaking the Lushootseed language called it something like Tahoma, or Tacoma, a word often translated as the mother of waters, or the source of the waters, or simply the great snowy mountain.
It was a fitting name. The mountain feeds the rivers that feed the entire region. The name Rainier came later, in seventeen ninety two, when the British explorer George Vancouver sailed into these waters and named the peak for a friend, Rear Admiral Peter Rainier, a naval officer who had fought against the American colonists and who never once laid eyes on the mountain that would carry his name.
That choice has been argued over ever since. When a map of Washington was shown at the World's Fair of eighteen ninety three, viewers reportedly came to blows over which name belonged on it. Washingtonians petitioned to restore the native name in eighteen ninety, again in nineteen seventeen, and again in nineteen twenty one, and all three times they were refused.
The debate continues today, with the Puyallup Tribe leading a renewed effort to bring back Tahoma. Whatever you call it, the mountain is so massive that it generates its own weather, pulling storms out of the Pacific and burying its slopes under some of the deepest snowfall recorded anywhere on Earth. Geologists rank it among the most dangerous volcanoes in the United States, not because of lava, but because of the ice and mud it could send racing toward the cities below.
For now it simply watches over the valley, silent, enormous, and close enough that on a clear day it seems to lean over your shoulder.
