“The Mountain Is Out!”
That’s the exclamation common among
Pacific Northwesterners when 14,410-
foot Rainier makes itself evident.
NPS PHOTO JUNE 2019 41
impasse. With the sun sinking, the wind bitter, and their
coats thousands of feet below, the men wrapped themselves
in outdated American flags they had packed to plant when
they had achieved the peak and contemplated the gap
between the summit and themselves. Hazard Stevens
reached for his coil of rope and fashioned a noose.
Stevens would have seen what he called “the leviathan of
mountains” for the first time in December 1854, upon arriv-
ing in Olympia, Washington, with his mother, Margaret, and
three younger sisters. The five had traveled from Narragan-
sett, Rhode Island, to meet paterfamilias Isaac Ingalls
Stevens. A decorated veteran of the Mexican War, the senior
Stevens had come west months earlier to claim his reward
for supporting Franklin Pierce’s successful presidential bid:
governorship of the newly formed Washington Territory and
an additional appointment as the region’s superintendent of
Indian affairs. Olympia was the seat of government for the
territory, a wild frontier stretching from the north shore of
the Columbia River to the Canadian border, and from the
Pacific coast to the Continental Divide.
Rainier, the most glaciated peak in the contiguous United
States, stood 75 miles east of Olympia, the half-million-year-
old progeny of lava from the western slope of the Cascades.