Rainier gives birth to a river

I've been roaming around Mount Rainier the past two days. I'm staying in a rustic but cozy cabin with no cell service, no TV, only two electrical outlets, but...internet access is good. Call it 21st century rustic. Here's the obligatory shot of the intrepid Solara and The Mountain, which looms over all.

Mount Rainier is only about as high as the tallest mountains in Colorado, a little over 14 thousand feet. But while the surrounding countryside in CO is over 5 thousand MSL and there are many peaks close together in the 13-14K MSL range, Rainier is twelve thousand feet above its surroundings, and stands alone. And it's massive! Thus, it looms over its landscape, dominating it clear to Puget Sound. Now, on the right of this pic is Nisqually Glacier, coming down the right side of the mountain...

And here's where the Nisqually glacier ends. Water is flowing out of the snout of the glacier as the warm summer sun melts ice and snow wikiwiki. This is the start of the Nisqually River. The ice at the snout is mostly buried under rock and silt transported down the mountain by the glacier. Thus, glacier snouts tend to be grungy.

Look in the lower right of this pic, between the trees, and you can see the snout of the glacier. At the bottom center is the terminal moraine, made up of silt and rocks transported down the mountain by the glacier in colder times, when it filled its valley much more than it does today.
Blow up the pic and you can see waterfalls coming off the mountain above the moraine. Rainier is shedding much of its moisture as ice and snow melts. But in about eight weeks, the trend will reverse, and for the following seven months or so, the mountain will accumulate much more snow than it sheds.

About ten miles downstream, the Nisqually River runs strongly, but fills only a small fraction of its channel. During floods the river assumes massive proportions, most recently in 2006 when a Pineapple Express storm raised the snow level far up on the peak and produced devastating flooding that trashed much of the National Park. Notice the trees in the center of the rocks...grim survivors, barely, of the floods. Now, in quieter times, the river flows with the silty runoff from the glaciers and snowfields on the slopes of Mt Rainier.