| Mount Rainier National Park includes 378 square miles of rugged terrain on the west slope of the Cascade mountains in central Washington. Its most imposing topographic and geologic feature is glacier-clad Mount Rainier. This volcano, composed chiefly of lfows of pyroxene andesite, was built upon an earlier mountainous surface, carved from altered volcanic and sedimentary rocks invaded by plutonic and hypabyssal igneous rocks of great complexity. -- Fisk, et.al., 1963 |
