Description:
This compendium makes a useful addition to the existing canon of personal accounts, age-yellowed histories, and helpful guidebooks to Washington State's Mount Rainier National Park. Kirk, who has written on both nature and history, lived in the park for five years, and has both climbed and circled Rainier. The book ranges widely, if not too deeply, into just about everything to do with a remarkable natural landscape capped by the highest mountain--from its base--in the lower 48 states. Kirk ably considers all sides of the park: the local animals, the history and nature of volcanic activity, the politics of the name "Rainier," and the environmental changes wrought by a boom in the region's population. In the "Voices of the Mountain" sections of the book, first-person written and photographic accounts of Rainier experiences highlight human interaction with the mountain over the last century. Centenarian Floyd Schmoe writes about working in the park in the 1920s, and poet Denise Levertov, who never visited the mountain, writes of its effect on her each time she viewed its snowy peak from her home in Seattle: "always loftier, lonelier than I ever remember." Enlivened by photographs on each page, some from as early as the turn of the century, this book is a fascinating introduction to the mountain Native Americans called Tahoma. --Maria Dolan
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