We were so giddy about Al Gore and his team’s recent Nobel Peace Prize win that we had to come up with a National Park topic week in his honor. We could have looked at the Park sites that honor Presidents who won the Nobel but that correlation wouldn’t have been completely accurate. So instead we’re examining Park sites that concern natural disasters.
So far in this series we’ve been stuck in the past. Mount Saint Helens might still be rumbling but she’s in a rebuilding stage. She won’t experience major magma ejection in the near future. And the glaciers that covered Pictured Rocks? Are they even any glaciers left? No, we’re headed just north of Mount Saint Helens to her much more powerful older brother: Mount Rainier.
Back when we visited in 2005, Michael wrote that Mount Ranier would erupt before the Seahawks or Mariners won a sports title. He could have thrown in the Sonics for good measure. He even wanted odds. Just a few months after his bold comment the Steelers meekly vanquished the Seahawks in Super Bowl XL with a little help from the referees. Nevertheless, Seattle teams have yet to win anything and Mount Rainier has yet to blow.
But it’s going to happen. We visited so many National Parks will a destructive past and an unpredictable future. Most seemed to work with long, predictable cycles of dormancy between their difficult outbursts. We also noticed that many were just about at that dormancy’s end stage and moving into that oh-no-she’s-gonna-blow stage. Mount Ranier was no exception. We’re not saying “PPAAAANNIIIIC” but we’re not buying land in Seattle anytime soon.
Click Here to Read More about Mount Rainier National Park.
NationalParksOnline.Net 