The Bee-Hive, a landmark on Cowlitz Cleaver, below Gibraltar.
In its dimensions, however, it is still one of the world's great peaks. The Rainier National Park, eighteen miles square—as large as many counties in the East—has an elevation along its western and lowest boundary averaging four thousand feet above sea level. Assuming a diameter for the peak of only twenty miles, the area occupied by this creature of a volcano exceeds three hundred square miles. Of its vast surface upwards of 32,500 acres, or about fifty-one square miles, are covered by glaciers or the fields of perpetual snow which feed them. A straight line drawn through from the end of North Tahoma glacier, on the west side, to the end of White glacier, on the east, would be thirteen miles long. The circumference of the crest on the 10,000-foot contour is nearly seven miles. Its glacial system is, and doubtless has long been, the most extensive on the continent, south of Alaska; it is said by scientists to outrank that of any mountain in Europe. The twelve primary glaciers vary in length from three to eight miles, and from half a mile to three miles in width. There are nearly as many "interglaciers," or smaller ice streams which gather their snow supply, not from the névé fields of the summit, but within the wedges of rock which the greater glaciers have left pointing upward on the higher slopes.
Mazama Club on Cowlitz Chimneys, looking across the ice-stream of the Cowlitz Glacier.
Climbing Cowlitz Cleaver to Gibraltar. This hacked and weather-worn spine left by the glaciers forms one wing of a great inverted V, with Gibraltar as its apex. On the other side of it is a drop of several thousand feet to Nisqually Glacier.