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This chapter has lesser known facts and lots of trivia about the park.
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Mount Rainier, the fifth national park, was established in 1899.
Captain George Vancouver, a British explorer, while mapping Puget Sound in 1792 was the first nonnative to see Mount Rainier. He named it after his friend Peter Rainier, a British naval officer. Local Indian tribes called it Takomma (there are various spellings). The first half of the twentieth century saw an ultimately unsuccessful effort to rename the peak Mount Tahoma.
The volcano is 500,000 years old, relatively young compared to the age of the Cascade Range (12 million years). The last eruption is estimated to have occurred between 1820 and 1894, with several observed events during this interval.
Rainier’s summit is 14,411' (elevations in the park range from 1600' to the summit—a vertical elevation change of 2.5 miles).
Size: The park is 368 square miles and contains 260 miles of maintained trails and 147 miles of roads.
Visitors: The park receives 1.7 million visitors per year and 11,000 attempts to summit per year, with 50 percent success.
The park has 26 named glaciers. Carbon Glacier has the thickest ice (700' in places). It is also the longest, at 5.7 miles. The Emmons Glacier is the largest, at 4.3 square miles.
The park has 382 lakes and 470 rivers and streams.
Average annual rainfall at Paradise is 126 inches.
Plant species in the park, 900; animal species, 54; bird species, 126; amphibians and reptile species, 17.
Maximum documented snowfall at Paradise: 1122 inches in 1971–72.
First known human activity is indicated by a projectile point found near the Snow Lake Trail, dated to approximately 5000 years ago.
Mount Rainier was first climbed by Hazard Stevens and Philemon Van Trump in 1870. They were guided to an area about 2 miles northeast of Paradise by Sluiskin, a Yakama Indian, who decided to stay near Cowlitz Rocks while Stevens and Van Trump summited.
John Muir climbed the mountain in 1888.
The first woman to climb Rainier was Fay Fuller in 1890.
The park has fire lookouts atop four peaks: Tolmie, Fremont, Shriner, and Gobblers Knob.
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