3

Cities and Their Volcanoes

Looking across the forests over which the mellow light of the sunset was streaming, I soon discovered the source of my friend’s excitement. There stood Mount Hood in all the glory of the Alpen glow looming immensely high, beaming with intelligence, and so impressive that one was overawed as if suddenly brought before some superior Being newly arrived from the sky.

—John Muir, Pacific Monthly

Despite the lessons of history—Pompeii in AD 79 or Saint-Pierre, Martinique, in 1902, for example—several Northwest cities take great proprietary pride in nearby volcanoes that help constitute their identities. Bellingham has claimed Mount Baker, Portland has claimed Mount Hood, Bend claims several, and both Seattle and Tacoma claim Mount Rainier as their own. They do so for reasons intimated by John Muir in his “Mt. Hood from Portland,” published more than a century ago. Muir’s Mount Hood glows and towers over the city just as William Samuel Parrott’s painting of Hood glows and towers over that subalpine lake without human presence, evoking (a generation earlier than Muir) some mythic time without Native Americans or cities. Muir’s animism more explicitly invokes the secular testimonies voiced at the twentieth century’s end. No one sold Portland better than Muir, who closes the distance between the city and the volcano looming to the east: “Mount Hood is in full view, with the summits of Mounts Jefferson, St. Helens, Adams and Rainier in the distance. The City of Portland is at our feet, covering a large area along both banks of the Willamette . . . a telling picture of busy, aspiring civilization in the midst of the green wilderness in which it is planted.”1

Fig. 5. A Washington State ferry in the San Juan Islands with Mount Baker in evening sun. Baker’s crater is in the dip just below and to the right of the summit. Courtesy of “Hyak approaching Lopez Island 02” by Compdude123 is licensed under CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hyak_approaching_Lopez_Island_02.jpg.

Muir’s metaphor renders Portland an organically rooted entity like the conifer foothills beyond and Mount Hood just beyond them. The fact that Mount Hood presents itself north of Clark County, Washington, or farther south in the Willamette Valley, or way up the Columbia River Gorge, becomes ultimately irrelevant against the claims of Oregon’s largest city. Since the nineteenth century as volcano and city coexist in intimate relation, Mount Hood has belonged to Portland. In Robin Cody’s novel Ricochet River (1992), he writes, “The white mountain loomed like Truth itself, or a bad painting.” And historian Carl Abbott underlines the bond, echoing Muir: “Usually the mountain is playground and backdrop, silhouetted against a sharp blue dawn on occasional clear winter mornings, tinged pink in summer evening sunsets.”2 The intimacy was confirmed by the iconic crowd scene of the Mazamas’ founding at Mount Hood’s crater, many of those climbers from Portland.

Muir’s characteristically painterly composition framed Mount Hood as the climax of the view of and from Portland—the view “from” is contained within the view “of.” He was likely positioned at Council Crest Park, named only four years before his article and the high point of the city’s West Hills. More than a thousand feet above sea level, Council Crest Park displays views of five volcanoes, and trees are pruned or cut to preserve the viewsheds. Of these, Mount Hood dominates. Though distinctly removed from Portland proper by distance and history, it remains atop the city’s self-portrait and psyche. That fact twice prompted the city—in the 1970s and in 1991—to issue building restrictions to preserve the vista corridors.3 Thus, the modern history of Oregon’s most famous volcano is, in some respects, an urban history, one that echoes and refracts the material and cultural changes in a particular cityscape.

Figure and ground are essential components of landscape composition, and in the unfolding aesthetic of nineteenth-century American landscape painting and photography, mountains became standard fare as monumental background. In some instances, cities attached themselves to a nearby mountain, and in the Northwest, volcanoes were handy. In such landscape composition people intuitively define themselves by association, as background showcases foreground—and vice versa, according to some human scales. As a municipal identity coalesced and matured, the volcano crowned that identity and afforded a number of bragging rights. The story of cities and their volcanoes includes a series of appropriations in many guises.

This is a story of connection and disconnection since geological history, of course, unfolds apart from human history, only randomly intruding upon the latter. Mount Hood no more “belongs” to Portland than the Three Sisters “belong” to Bend. Yet residents often feel they do. The powerful illusion of juxtaposition creates a series of habits and consequences, some pleasurable and some perilous. Juxtaposition means much more than potential eruption—the threat of lahars from Mount Rainier for Pierce County communities along the historic floodplains above Tacoma’s Commencement Bay, for instance. The ambivalence of juxtaposition explains one strand of regional identity and documents, from an urban vantage, the shifting chronicle of modern human interactions on the snowpeaks.

This chapter plots the ambivalent history suggested by the possessive adjective their in its title. The adjective poses a complex pretense—which fact has never slowed marketing or brand identification. The chapter addresses two questions: in what respects can it be said that Eugene, Salem, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Yakima, or Bellingham own their particular volcanoes? And what are the dangers of proprietorship given the proximity of particular volcanoes? The Portland–Mount Hood symbiosis, for example, manifests itself through a startling range of behaviors over the past 150 years or more. Though Oregon claims more volcanoes than Washington, more than half its population lives within Multnomah and Washington Counties—in or near Portland, which includes more volcanic vents and cinder cones than any other city on the continent. Geologically, Portland bears a special affinity with those volcanoes in its Council Crest Park panorama. And Mount Hood poses a clear case of the legacy of proximity and the fiction of identification.

Many commentators have echoed Theodore Winthrop’s extravagant claim that the Northwest comprises a bigger, better New England, with one historian, Carlos Schwantes, recently borrowing the first lines of “America the Beautiful”: “the opening stanza . . . could well describe its mountain peaks and amber waves of grain.”4 Though Katharine Lee Bates had Colorado’s Pikes Peak in view when she penned “purple mountains’ majesty,” the epithet belongs to the Cascades as well. The quasi-Christian testimony of residents, many of them urban or suburban, again confirms the snowpeaks as godlike entities. According to this fond looking glass, we live in a heavenly place (see Winthrop or novelist Thomas Wolfe). Physical proximity or contiguity engenders an imaginative ownership, as several volcanoes form the indispensable core if not climax of the panoramic urban landscapes. Furthermore, such imaginative ownership engenders a conviction of privilege in the regional ethos, as background enhances and enlarges foreground.

In the Northwest proximity feeds and seals identity, one version being the juxtaposition of city or suburb with backcountry, or “hinterland.” “Hinterland” sends mixed semantic signals in its historical sense of being land remote from urban areas, particularly insofar as “remote” connotes “behind”—behind the times. In the nineteenth century, of course, all the “old Oregon territory” was hinterland from mostly white population centers, and the volcano-strewn Cascades epitomized hinterland for a period after the Oregon Trail accelerated settlement. Certainly meanings of hinterland overlap with those of wilderness, and in the last century its status steadily and dramatically tilted. Backcountry presumes front country, the growing cities of the region. Paradoxically, hinterland gains value as we draw near and settle in—it seems to reach closer to us. The juxtaposition of arctic islands with young cities sharpens the paradox and increases its lure.5

Juxtaposition depends on accessibility and some minimum of affluence. Hinterland’s enhanced value is manifested through our road system. In recent years, for example, Washington’s Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area, in its annual data of user days, has proven one of the country’s busiest. In high season trails in the South Fork of the Snoqualmie River valley, along the I-90 corridor, imitate Seattle’s big parks (e.g., Discovery, Volunteer, or Woodland Parks) in foot traffic. To reach these or other highly prized, wild places near Seattle, we just grab the right gear and hop in the car—and battle jammed I-5, or I-90 beyond North Bend. Regional residents—those seeking outdoors pursuits—want to have their cake and eat it too, and they do. Urbanites want high culture and high mountains, and for many the best wild places are the volcanoes. In “only an hour” they reach “an ocean of freedom,” as stock a metaphor as any to define alpine country.6 The endless freedom of high country close by reconciles many to urban life, an old story. Our vehicles and highways close the physical gap between city and volcano that has been repeatedly bridged through acts of imaginative appropriation.

The fact that high hinterland affords spacious personal freedom—see Mountaineers writer Harvey Manning’s title, Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills—sustains the oldest testimony in mountaineering. As is well known, friendships become both more fluid and enduring in the mountains. This social value of being, for instance, on a volcano above eight thousand feet enlarges the possibility (and traditional value) of personal transformation. Acquaintances can turn into trusted friends, and old friends grow closer. The alpine benefit of juxtaposition and accessibility seems beyond dispute, as the individual temporarily sheds her normal life and discovers—or rediscovers—new, abiding connections in high places.

So the value of the volcanoes’ proximity also resides in their alpine setting that democratizes human interactions—in some respects—and cements friendships differently from the low-altitude zones where most people cluster. Mountaineers have always known that being roped up often engenders close bonds that long outlast the pitches. The rope literalizes intimate connection. On the snowpeaks friendships old and new differ in quality and depth. Guides on Rainier or Hood have known for generations that, for their clients at least, the temporary guide-client friendship endures beyond the climb, in part because of the “aha” moments when the clients undergo the kind of transformation climbers have always extolled. For most that transformation has always been shared, at least with one or a few others. It’s private and social. Though the volcanoes own a central place in these cities’ composed landscapes, part of their value inheres in their spectacular difference: a difference that can seal deep bonds.

Volcano proximity—arctic islands near at hand—defines, in part, Northwest status since weekend climbers can summit a volcano with no disruption to their weekday work schedules. This brag rings true for many urban- or suburbanites and undergirds Northwest exceptionalism as it manifests the good life, an optimal mix of urban lifestyles and glaciers. That crammed scenario, unimaginable to the first generations of climbers, had become commonplace by the 1980s. One sign of mountaineering as a mass sport in the twentieth century’s closing decades, this scenario represented an undisputed quality-of-life benchmark. It can’t get better than this rapid-fire, city-summit-city plot: we can have a quickie with a volcano, with sufficient funds and leisure. The contiguity of hinterlands to metro centers lends the latter their particular frisson and fuels their boasts of a superior ethos. We’ve got it all, the regional mantra goes. What had emerged by the 1880s, from both local inhabitants and railroad promoters (like Northern Pacific), abides through the present.

As the narrator in a recent Seattle novel chauvinistically comments, “even pedestrians glided by without hats or umbrellas in fleece jackets and ultralight hiking boots, as if they might scale Rainier that afternoon if the weather cleared.”7 Juxtaposition makes Northwest cities exceptional since lots of folks did (and do) devote their weekends to the mountains, even as their styles and dress have shifted over generations. The Cascades as last frontier prompted an urban-suburban pattern of use.

A city with volcano views confirms a happy choice of location for old and recent residents, whose imaginative claims follow their eyes. Most don’t close the gap like climbers, thankfully; they remain content with “their” volcano in view, like Mount Hood and the other four volcanoes from Portland’s Council Crest Park. The term viewshed implies some proprietary relationship, however imagined or bogus, between viewer and viewed. Viewshed occupies some uneasy conceptual place between landscape theory and real estate practice. No doubt it derives from the nineteenth-century romantic sublime, when the monumental and alpine provided the backdrop in ideal landscape composition. If casual viewers, sighting one or more volcanoes, receive a charge as Muir insists regarding Mount Hood, then cities built nearby inflate their civic pride through their imaginative annexation of the proximate snowpeak.

As Lou Whittaker, the other half of the United States’ most famous mountaineering twins, commented about Rainier, “It’s almost like an ownership for people around here.”8 If a given volcano is defined in sacred terms, in Northwest literary tradition, the claim is at root religious: it “belongs” to us because we need it. Acts of annexation reveal one kind of regional history according to its urban cores: a history that affirms the volcanoes’ grip in the regional imaginary.

The first half of the twentieth century disclosed a regional and national population shift away from towns and rural communities into cities and that increasingly prevalent, contiguous hybrid, suburbs. In the latter half of the century, “Greater” Seattle connected north to Everett and south to Tacoma and Olympia beyond: most Washingtonians live within this urban-suburban-rural corridor along southeastern Puget Sound. Rainier, premiere visual icon, rises just beyond it, as close as one’s windows or windshield. Driving to Paradise, or to Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood’s south slopes, simply closed the gap from Tacoma’s Point Defiance Park or Portland’s Washington Park, respectively. But the gap is real, despite the fond eyes of city dwellers and promoters who have always used a telephoto lens to pull a volcano close.

In the Northwest several cities, during their early adolescence, seized upon the proximate volcano to solidify their municipal identity and brand. They broadcast, in myriad forms and venues, the figure-ground landscape composition. Just as Council Crest Park, at the turn of the twentieth century, confirmed Portland’s attachment to Mount Hood, Seattle’s 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, built on the University of Washington (UW) campus, confirmed Rainier’s place in its viewshed. The most famous vista at the exposition, and the most famous campus view for over one century, runs southeast from the central quadrangle to Drumheller Fountain in the center foreground and beyond it, the Montlake Cut, sections of Lake Washington and Mercer Island, and in the center background, Rainier. A traditional landscape composition, one endlessly reproduced.

In images from 1909 through the present, Rainier is often pulled closer to the city than it really is. Once the campus was moved, decades earlier, from the central business district northeast to the tract bordering the Montlake Cut and Lake Washington’s Montlake Bay, Rainier assumed a visual and psychological place at Washington’s first university, one confirmed by the subsequent design of the fountain and view corridor. Thus the premiere university is linked with the premiere mountain, which “presided” over the fair just as it presides over UW and Seattle. This particular fit into campus design, like other views of Rainier from the central business district or various neighborhoods north and south, matches the placement of Mount Hood as visual center of interest in eastward Portland vistas. Rainier’s broad dome lends itself to foreshortened perspectives as though it bulges closer than it is—as though, in words taken from a recent novel, “the looming snowball of Mount Rainier had rolled a little closer to downtown.”9

Viewsheds dramatize the value of contiguity. With Mount Rainier the implications of juxtaposition are foreshadowed in the very title of the environmental history of Mount Rainier National Park, National Park, City Playground (2006).10 The juxtaposition suggests that the former extends and frames the latter: that the biggest volcano (and its park) derives much of its value from its contiguity with one or more cities, rather than in and of itself. In any long view Rainier is apart, but it is also a part—that’s the essential paradox, for both are true. In this story, the meanings of Rainier overlap and depend upon the meanings of Tacoma or Seattle. As “city playground,” MRNP in its history has been pushed and pulled according to changing paradigms in natural amenity economics, and “use” “embraces both recreation and exploitation [and] includes the packaging, sale, and consumption of nature as an aesthetic experience.”11

Portland’s Council Crest Park epitomizes this strand of Northwest urban history, of myriad acts of imaginative appropriation. Northwest volcanoes have been branded and sold for a long time, as regional marketing, painting, and photography, for example, attest. The late nineteenth-century journalism, ranging from personal testimonies to those Wonderland guides in the case of Rainier, recommended a visit or climb as an optimal product. A visit, hike, or climb promises great personal gain in limited time: heavy time constraints bound and frame one’s “mountain fever.” More recently, the “commodification of nature as an aesthetic experience” has become a commonplace among contemporary environmental historians, those who chronicle the long history of a physical landscape or landscapes (and the built environments therein).

The volcanoes, crowns of the regional geography, enjoy a rich virtual reality far removed from their specific locations through endless reproduction in many visual media. When movies came to the volcanoes—The Call of the Wild (1935) or Jerome Hill’s Ski Flight (1936) or Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which used Timberline Lodge for exterior shots (1980)—the latter acquired a new cachet far beyond the region, one parallel to the mountain photography pioneered by Northwest photographer Asahel Curtis and in the next generation, photographers Ray Atkinson and Bob and Ira Spring.

Such filmmakers or photographers pulled the volcanoes in far closer than city parks or prospects do. They boost the work of appropriation. As a result of such reproduction the volcanoes reappeared inside, on the walls of art galleries or homes, or on coffee tables in large format books. They were domesticated, brought down to size through myriad marketing strategies and brands. And in the past generation, endless images appear on countless websites, many of those urban websites, as though the volcanoes’ virtual presence eclipses their actual positions.

Arguably, the habit of commodification comes from the city, home of the marketplace. Volcano-as-playground confirms the tendency to commodify them. For Seattle and Tacoma leaders past and present, packaging Rainier means construing it as an extension of their respective park systems, themselves sites of complex landscape design and domestication. Given its overwhelming viewshed values, the volcano is annexed as if it belongs to both cities. These spectacular views elevate us, and they sell. Always have.

So volcanoes serve not only as brands but also as unique playgrounds, extensions of municipal park spaces. Mount Rainier as recreational space figured into the municipal identities of Seattle and Tacoma from their earliest years. In the era of auto tourism this mind-set gained force due to the quickly established pattern of weekend visits. The pattern has only been modified, not changed, since then. Visiting a volcano grew out of the Sunday afternoon drive, as motorists sought out countryside no longer present in their daily lives. In their initial decades of growth, both Seattleites and Tacomans regarded Rainier as a culminating symbol of their good fortune. Early city planners capitalized on residents’ symbolic appropriation, claiming Rainier “had a tonic effect on the cities’ residents”: it’s good for you.12 The boast has not changed, as it applies Winthrop’s airy prediction for the Northwest as a Chosen Land. Both cities exercised proprietary claims over Rainier, believing the mountain symbolized “the scenic beauty, quality of living, and regional superiority” of each.13 In this view, volcano proximity confirmed each city’s happy story of itself, one that still flourishes. The Evergreen State’s two largest cities thrive in the glow of the biggest volcano.

As an environmental historian has written of Seattleites, “catching fish, climbing mountains, or picnicking in the city’s parks were more than idyllic escapes; they were also matters of politics and power.”14 The fact that picnicking was linked with fishing and mountaineering illustrates the historical consequences of Rainier’s urban glow, as the volcano was scripted as an extension of the city’s recreational credo. Each activity figures as part of urban presumption. Here and in other cities, the wishes of the prosperous prevailed. Financial interests in nearby cities called the shots and determined the human footprint on several volcanoes, removing other kinds of claims. For example, the so-called “consensus view,” primarily white upper and middle class, pressured the removal of mining claims in Glacier Basin on Rainier’s northeast side and the retirement of any extant grazing practices. Neither mining nor cattle grazing belonged in the playground, nor did Native Americans.

Of much graver consequence, the ancient lifeways of tribal peoples were swept aside. With Mount Rainier, traditional tribal (e.g., Nisqually or Yakama) claims or presence nearby the volcano—seasonal hunting and berry picking, for example—were denied. The fact that snowpeaks themselves were taboo zones for most tribes in no way precluded their seasonal use of alpine parks and drainages below timberline, of course. In some instances, because of the contiguity of reservations (e.g., Mount Adams or Mount Jefferson), enforced exclusion did not take place.

The exclusion of old Nisqually or Yakama practices around Rainier is a local example of a pervasive pattern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of forced tribal removal from newly designated parks.15 By the nineteenth century’s end, urban proponents of the park, descendants of Theodore Winthrop’s own racism and blindness to tribal degradation, presumed Native Americans would either assimilate or die, the prevailing white paradigm until the early twentieth century. Drawing park boundaries or, later, wilderness area boundaries tended to discount or downright ignore ancient human traffic—traffic symbolized by Native names for particular volcanoes as well as the accompanying creation stories. Native absence from Rainier’s environs matched the prevalent, twilight-of-the-gods credo. The question of whose park, or more broadly, whose volcano, was being answered by mostly urban, mostly privileged classes.

Urban viewsheds, then, excluded other, older views and connections. In the figure-ground composition, a glaciated volcano served (and serves) as spectacular ground for the built environment front and center. Of course the built environment, in early stages, didn’t look pretty. When Sanford Gifford and Albert Bierstadt painted Mount Rainier from the southeast tip of Vashon Island in 1874 and 1889, respectively, they entirely omitted the “figure,” the raw, young industrial city of Tacoma—an early instance of what has been recently called ecopornography, that tendency to “greenwash” or airbrush a given landscape to the point of significant factual (or documentary) distortion. The fact that Gifford placed two sea canoes in the right foreground instead (ten figures in the larger canoe, four in the smaller) illustrates the very old Nisqually habitation under Tahoma just at the time of its eclipse. The canvas affirmed the “vanishing race” mind-set, assigning the Natives to a mythic past that in the 1870s was disappearing. Subsequent tribal history gives the lie to that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, racist ethos. The desired city-volcano symbiosis didn’t always fit prevailing criteria for optimal landscape composition, though those criteria soon shifted to include facets of the foreground.

Seattleites and Tacomans jostled for decades over the notion that Rainier belonged to one or the other, but not both—like two young bucks fighting for the exclusive favors of a girl who belongs to neither. Tacoma’s closer but Seattle’s bigger, etc. Not only that, but different values jockeyed for preeminent position. The competition grew most heated over the volcano’s “proper” name, Tacomans and some others stressing the fact that city and volcano shared the same native name. Yet during the fin de siècle lobbying for a national park, rivalries disappeared as both preservationists and commercial interests joined hands in common cause. As always, the cities had the numbers. Both constituencies were primarily urban, the former as members of the Washington Alpine Club or its successors, the Mazamas and the Mountaineers.

Though Congress settled the name issue in 1899, the intercity rivalry appears, in retrospect, less important than that between preservationists and developers. The region’s dominant volcano serves as bellwether since it has always appealed to contradictory values, potential personal transformation or potential dollars. MRNP’s history of commodification (e.g., Rainier National Park Company) reveals an uneasy compromise between a host of spiritual and aesthetic claims and the eternal lure of the bottom line. In the past century the latter has increasingly preempted the former. Private experiences have grown increasingly prepackaged if not diluted by sheer numbers and the usually irresistible glow of status tourism. Additionally, use has a messy history in which “recreation” sometimes leaks as “exploitation,” and experience leaves deposits.

In the last century’s first four decades, no one embodied those mutually exclusive outcomes as conspicuously as Asahel Curtis, co-founder of the Mountaineers in 1906, founder of its Seattle-Tacoma Rainier National Park Committee in 1910 (renamed the Rainier National Park Advisory Board in 1916), and promoter extraordinaire. Curtis was, with his older brother, Edward, as famous a homegrown photographer as the region has seen, and his body of work, above all his camera eye, documented, in miniature, the urban Sound’s appropriation of Rainier. For all his mountaineering, he wanted infrastructure and lots of it. His ring road proposal for Mount Rainier, one imaginative annexation of a volcano, denies its status as fundamentally apart, other.16

In NPS history, MRNP was the first park located near two cities, a crucial fact in the story of cities and “their” volcanoes, particularly to the extent that Rainier has been a lead example of imaginative appropriation. The urban history of Rainier—an apparent paradox—not only inscribes the deep ambivalence of city-volcano juxtaposition, but represents one increasingly important facet of NPS history: the legacy of proximity in thickening patterns of short-term visitation. The history also unsurprisingly reveals the dominance of upper- and middle-class white interests—their standards of decorum—dictating park policy and development to the exclusion of other groups. Those interests derived from late nineteenth-century park aesthetics inspired by Frederic Law Olmsted, the nineteenth century’s most famous city parks designer who also worked in Seattle, and his peers. The Olmsted Plan, adopted by Seattle and developed by Olmsted’s sons after 1903, featured amenities such as ball fields and tennis courts, which would be underused by Seattle’s working class and racial minority populations.

Analogously, those with more money wanted their volcano park according to their wishes. Working class folks and racial and ethnic minorities from the cities were less welcome, as the brief history of the Cooperative Campers movement (1916–22) evidences.17 That Stephen Mather and the MRNP superintendent jointly decided to remove the Coop Campers suggests a socio-economic class war.

The Coop Campers felt the Rainier National Park Company did not accommodate poor people; the monopoly concessionaire regarded the coop’s services as a violation of its park contract. It is no coincidence that the Coop Campers flourished during the period of Seattle’s general strike and that its most famous leader, Anna Louise Strong, was an active socialist. But with the NPS backing the Rainier National Park Company, the outcome was foretold. Only gradually was the grip of the leisured classes lessened at MRNP and other volcanoes.18 To this day, of course, visiting, hiking, or climbing remains a financial privilege that precludes many members of nearby urban populations.

Highways enabled municipalities to imaginatively annex nearby volcanoes, thus enhancing the proprietary illusion. Private vehicles sealed the case for cities and “their” volcanoes, as they extend the habits of domestication. Mounts Hood, Rainier, Baker, and others became and remain weekend leisure goals. Just as urbanites use their neighborhood parks to stroll, picnic, or toss a Frisbee, many do the same at the volcano in their viewshed. Mount Rainier especially served as an outstanding “reservoir of the primitive,” the best of hinterland, for a region increasingly urban (and suburban) rather than rural.19 In the Northwest, perhaps the best form of nearby hinterland remains the volcanoes, supremely reservoirs of the primitive. This rich metaphor, along with the notion of the arctic island, defines the volcanoes’ acute appeal. The juxtaposition of arctic and primitive with temperate, sea-level built environments stamps Northwest urban identity. The juxtaposition also explains why so many town or city dwellers love nearby volcanoes, because they like to imaginatively or literally touch the primitive, however fleetingly.

Of course, most visitors cherish their iconic volcano for its differences from, rather than similarities to parks in Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, or Bend. They delight in their brief, felt encounters with this geologic version of primitivism. The appeal of the primitive invokes a thick, ironic history of interpretation in the past two to three centuries among groups who identified themselves as variously First World, progressive, affluent, intellectual, or cultured. The image of Theodore Winthrop mocking the three natives who paddled or guided him in 1853 instances one stereotypical, nineteenth-century narrative of First World affluence encountering what it labeled primitive. Of course, not only indigenes but exotic landscapes, including the U.S. West’s monumental mountains and canyons, were thus labeled and patronized. In the twentieth-century Northwest the lure of nearby volcanoes underscored people’s lifelong fascination with their elemental nature.

That people construe a nearby arctic island as part and parcel of their urban landscapes and lives is wishful thinking, an illusion whose nuances have been happily ignored by urban architects, boosters, and marketers, though not by vulcanologists or poets (e.g., Marianne Moore, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder).

Cities establish their claims through publicity stunts and annual traditions. In north Puget Sound, Whatcom County in the early twentieth century developed in its urban core a volcano identity similar to those communities along Puget Sound’s southeast shores or in the lower Willamette Valley. That appropriation manifests itself through a celebrated foot (and ski) race and destination ski resort, the latter capitalizing on big winter snowfalls. Though Mount Baker easily lies within sightlines from Washington’s Island and San Juan Counties, the northern Olympic Peninsula, and British Columbia’s two primary cities, Bellingham has long claimed it as its own. During the same period when road builders punched Chuckanut Drive along the cliffs bordering Samish Bay, thereby providing an overland link to Whatcom County for the first time, the Bellingham Chamber of Commerce joined forces with the Mount Baker Club in an unusual publicity ploy that connected the young city with the graceful volcano just to the east.

The city conceived a palpable link according to individual human effort via an annual seashore-to-summit race. This ultra-marathon commenced in 1911 and lasted only three years due to accidents and chronic dangers. But this fund-raising stunt spawned a sound-to-summit tradition that, after a sixty-year hiatus, reversed direction, reinvented as the Ski to Sea Race: a relay linking crater to sound, dropping two vertical miles. In the increasingly outdoor recreational present, this annual event flourishes.20 As a robust publicity engine the race further solidifies the city-volcano link: Baker belongs to Bellingham.21

Of course relatively few run to or ski off a volcano; most want personal comfort and convenience, the usual suspects. So Bellingham, like other regional cities, consciously promoted itself as a gateway community. “Gateway” enhances the appropriation and deepens the municipal identity. A century ago, a spur railroad line ran partway up the Nooksack River valley to the settlement of Glacier, just northwest of the volcano. The story of development, here and around Mount Adams, precluded national park status: mining companies, for example, bested local preservation interests. In Bellingham mountain and city clubs joined forces as in Seattle and Tacoma and lobbied hard for a Mount Baker national park in the 1910s. But in 1917 the mining lobby squelched a bill that had been well supported by a congressional committee.22

Bellingham, like Portland, proved a test case in national park lobbying, but local mountain clubs and chambers of commerce in both, along with those in Yakima and even Spokane, failed to follow Seattle’s and Tacoma’s successful example. They pushed hard against Mather and Albright of the NPS. In the eleven years following 1908, nine bills establishing a Mount Baker national park were introduced. Between 1919 and 1921, three bills were introduced establishing a Yakima national park focused on Mount Adams.23 Three cities joined the bandwagon but their lobbying came to naught: for the Park Service, three volcano-based parks (including Mount Lassen) in the range was enough. Urban lobbying indirectly created what became Washington State Route 542 and the ski resort on the northeast side: a regional story of urban identification and self-aggrandizement. Failing a national park, Bellingham and Yakima—and Portland, Salem, Eugene, and Bend—developed other expressions of proximity as gateway communities. In each case, they have extended their identity to the nearby volcano (or volcanoes) through their marketing and promise of quick access.

In the 1920s Mount Baker was subject to diverse recreation and development agendas including a destination resort based on the new sport of downhill skiing. As at Rainier’s Paradise, Mount St. Helens’ Spirit Lake, Mount Hood’s Timberline, and other locales, destination resorts provided luxurious creature comforts adjacent to the exotic, a snowpeak—the pleasing tension of stark contrast. In 1926, 74,859 acres around the volcano were designated (by the secretary of agriculture) for recreation and resource extraction, and the USFS designated a 188,000-acre game preserve.24 But the resort attracted far more money and attention: Congress appropriated monies and a road was built to Heather Meadows and Austin Pass, along the divide between the volcano and the ever-photographed Mount Shuksan immediately east. In 1927 Mount Baker resort, with 100 rooms, opened, and four years later an improved highway was finished.25

Downhill skiing at Baker appeared pre-destined, as at select other volcanoes: fresh snow only an hour east from sea level! The early 1930s saw the same growth hosted by local interests (e.g., Mount Baker Ski Club) and the lure of tournaments and races as far south as Mount Rainier and Mount Hood. Furthermore, in 1934–35, the film adaptation of Jack London’s popular novel, The Call of the Wild, was shot at the ski resort. Hollywood comes to the volcanoes! Stars Clark Gable, Loretta Young, and Reginald Owen were photographed on skis, and these glossies and press reports linked the new sport with the location. The PR could not have been better for Bellingham, a gateway community reconfirmed each generation according to new media outlets and packaging.26

The argument for contiguity and appropriation was sealed in a mid-twentieth century anthology, The Cascades: Mountains of the Pacific Northwest (1949). In its introduction editor Roderick Peattie, using one of American history’s hoariest metaphors, defined the Cascades as “the last frontier” and “essentially a wilderness.” The former conception revealed a combination of myopic thinking, wistful desire, and local chauvinism. Peattie, a mountains geographer, unsurprisingly ignored the long history of tribal uses of the snowpeaks. Instead, he immediately affirmed the region’s proprietary relation to its most exceptional mountains: “I know of no mountain area more completely, pridefully, and possessively claimed by a people than the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.”27 This affinity sustained Winthrop’s symbolic appropriation of Mount Rainier nearly a century earlier. A writer like Peattie repeats the well-worn civilization-frontier trope ever recurring in American literature. In his uncritical boast, northwesterners presumed ownership, but especially those in its larger towns and cities who found a snowpeak within their viewshed. There is nothing new about towns or cities borrowing a nearby mountain to complete their idealized self-portraits, yet an energetic urban identification with particular volcanoes proves an ambivalent legacy at best.

“Last frontiers,” whatever their conceptual legitimacy, exist to be entered and, to varying degrees, changed into something other than themselves, according to our history. In the Northwest the westering narrative of nineteenth-century white history met up with the prediction of cultivation and settlement voiced by George Vancouver at the end of the eighteenth century. A later chapter of this narrative, one devoted to alpine recreation, is highlighted by the ballooning memberships in local mountain clubs, especially those based in the cities. The Mazamas had already celebrated their golden anniversary in 1944 and the Mountaineers would soon celebrate theirs. By this time, the advantages of nearby hinterland were clear and the pattern of weekend exodus was set, as alpinists pursued their special, private places. This prideful comment defines, in a local context, recreational tourism. The weekend-exodus-and-return pattern represents a more general version of the climber’s vaunted city-crater-city plot mentioned earlier. Those with sufficient income, desire, and skill can enjoy expensive cuisines and snowpeaks all in the space of forty-eight or seventy-two hours. Or less.

The 1950s arguably proved the last decade before explosive growth in the mountains and particularly on the volcanoes. Within a decade or two, the notion of private places in the mountains proved increasingly elusive. Appearing near the beginning of the baby boom generation, The Cascades beckoned people with their cars and their boots, and the “steady stream” of visitors accelerated. “Front line” volcanoes—Baker, Rainier, St. Helens, Hood, Jefferson, Washington, and the Sisters, for instance—functioned as mirrors of their self-regard and symbols of their desire, and they streamed to them like Alice stepping through her looking glass. In the process they embodied a combination of recreational and status tourism—a shifting combination.

By the late twentieth century, though city park visitation patterns—such as food or information kiosks, picnic, short paved walk—remained in place, a sizable group increasingly valued their close-up encounter for its overwhelming differences from their lowland lives. On the snowpeaks they endorsed poet Gary Snyder’s Zen Buddhist credo of climbs as walking prayers and summits as sites for self-transcendence.

During this period that steady stream, coupled with the population concentration in or near the west slope cities, resulted in air pollution impacting volcanoes and occasionally viewsheds—an additional source of obscurity besides the seasonal low cloud cover. What, then, might be concluded about the juxtaposition of cities and volcanoes in the early twenty-first century? Those moving to the Northwest in the past twenty years often cite its extraordinary landscapes as a primary indicator in quality of life, and among those, the volcanoes are of course hard to miss.28 Northwest urbanites always want rich choices even if they choose outdoors over indoors, or high altitude over sea level. Increasingly, some folks want all of the above.

Increasing numbers alternately head for the mountains or the cities’ leading cultural institutions, given the popularity of Seattle’s Macaw and Benaroya Halls and the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), or Portland’s Opera, Symphony, or Art Museum, as well as countless other cultural offerings. The splendid geographical endowment complements the cultural institutions of the built environment. Urban (or suburban) northwesterners don’t necessarily prefer a volcano to their opera, but they want both options convenient (if not always affordable) just as they demand Starbucks or Seattle’s Best or Tully’s. Contemporary urban expectations depend upon a rapid shift between sea level and ten thousand feet (or higher). It’s no surprise that the region’s superb natural setting has advertised itself for generations and that, as its urban cores spread in the twentieth century’s closing decades, more newcomers expected and satisfied a wide spectrum of quality options, one that linked coffee houses and jazz clubs with nearby volcanoes. In the flattering self-portrait, the background completes the urban foreground.

Of course, this luxury of choice characterizing the affluent ignores those legions who barely make it and rarely patronize a playhouse, let alone get out to the mountains. In sheer numbers, the majority of city dwellers lack the wherewithal to visit or climb volcanoes. Or more crucially, volcanoes don’t fire their imaginations, barely existing on the margins of their radar or desire. They would not visit or hike or climb even if they had the money and time. And given increasingly common congestion in greater Portland (for example, I-5 between Tigard and Vancouver) or between Tacoma and Everett, the road system, above all I-5 and its spurs, is approaching or has reached saturation: a glaring dark side to the good life, as many local critics (e.g., Knute Berger, in Pugetopolis) have written.

The dark side poses an unintended legacy of the usual endless growth model. In Seattle history “Greater Seattle” became a fixed mantra by the 1960s, and dissenting voices such as journalist Emmett Watson’s—leader of the mocking “Lesser Seattle” movement whose motto was KBO, or “Keep The Bastards Out”—knew they wouldn’t prevail against the bigger-is-better paradigm and in-migration. As cities (and suburbs) grow, so does human traffic on the volcanoes.

By the twentieth century’s end, the volcanoes’ proximity was being redefined again—stretched, as increasing numbers spent increasing time driving to trailheads. Thick traffic, like an organism’s clogged arteries, now forces residents to question the region’s declining ecological health, or at least the infrastructure or their unreflective private auto habits, particularly if it’s taking longer to reach Timberline Lodge or the Cascade Lakes highway above Bend, or Rainier’s Paradise or Sunrise. In the twenty-first century, it might take longer to reach that volcano at the other end of the view. In the old parable of local demand and supply, proximity feeds growth and profits. But the transportation infrastructure, with its clotting surface traffic, measures the cost of our vaunted juxtaposition.

In many respects, then, nearby volcanoes cap urban self-portraits, and the habits of play upon the volcanoes extend residents’ recreation in city parks. Residents happily enact Winthrop’s self-aggrandizing prediction of a century and a half ago. In ideal Northwest landscape composition, a snowpeak as “ground” fulfills the foreground “figure,” the city. Bend, Oregon, for example, occupies center stage, and the Three Sisters, Mount Bachelor, Belknap Crater, and the other clustered volcanoes exist primarily to enhance its “arrived” status. This wish fulfillment is splendidly confirmed from panoramic Pilot Butte State Scenic Viewpoint, itself an old cinder cone within Bend’s city limits. But a city-volcano intimacy presumes a non-existent interdependency. However much certain natives memorize “their” volcano’s shape and colors through four seasons or over a lifetime, or however frequently it is photographed or painted or sculpted or written, it remains apart far more than any part of us.

The futile desire to somehow belong to volcanoes, which underlies the wide habits of branding and the psychology of viewsheds, is corroborated by one who recently knew Mount Rainier close up more than most anyone else. Mike Gauthier, native Washingtonian, spent eighteen and a half years (1990–2008) as a climber ranger at MRNP, the final five years serving as Supervisory Climbing Ranger. Gauthier represents the masses who want Northwest volcanoes, particularly Rainier, under their boots, soaring just above. He worked as an ultimate foreground figure in the middle of our telephoto views, as he spent several summer seasons at 9500 feet while posted at Camp Schurman on Rainier’s northeast flank. An intimate of Rainier, Gauthier epitomizes our proprietary heritage and fond gaze.

Studying the ridges and glaciers above and below him, Gauthier stated, “There’s a real sense that I’m part of what’s happening and it’s part of my life. I don’t think of leaving the mountain and going home. I actually think of the mountain as my home.”29 This sentiment expresses a well-worn credo of mountaineering, in fact an archetype that precedes, in some manifestations, the nineteenth-century growth of European and American alpinism, ancient local habits of aversion (e.g., Yakama and Nisqually) notwithstanding. Despite John Muir’s skepticism atop Mount Rainier in 1888 (Chapter 1), “mountain glory” meant that summit craters also figure as a home place: a concept that developed in late nineteenth-century mountaineering ideology and prevailed through much of the twentieth. As an extension of urban space we have used front-range volcanoes as light show spectacles (e.g., Mount Hood in 1887) or cemeteries or, more recently, as sites for fundraisers and corporate self-improvement schemes.30 A Gauthier, with Rainier at his doorstep, serves as spokesman for the population. Those snowpeaks in our backyard belong to us.

But the limits of that tempting illusion are also voiced by Gauthier, who concedes, “I’ve come to learn that the mountain plain doesn’t care. It doesn’t care about me or anyone else.”31 Rainier’s indifference denies not only all urban claims to a given volcano but all sense of human identification stretching back beyond Theodore Winthrop. The geological reality of the volcanoes utterly apart from human life embodies a biocentric rather than anthropocentric perspective, and however standard the former has become in recent environmental theory and praxis, that paradigm shift cannot discount the Northwest history of cultural ownership.

In centuries past, though most tribes kept their distance, they embraced nearby volcanoes through names and origin stories that figured in the central fabric of their histories. The volcanoes existed in storied relation to them. Many among the more recent regional population desire some sustained relation, which takes many forms.

In fact, recent and contemporary patterns of volcano use of necessity exist between these eternal contraries of connection yet disconnection, even as the volcanoes’ geologic status always trumps the signs of the former. Figure and ground, built environment and volcano backdrop, constitute a false relation, and the indifference of the latter, like any landscape, exposes the vanity of human longing—our romantic conceit. Gauthier voices our dilemma wherein a volcano feels like a home place yet never is. The latter recognition links him with John Muir’s concession about Rainier’s summit. “Home” is not home; ground remains disconnected from fond figure—Bellingham’s preferred version of itself, for example, with Bellingham Bay in foreground and Mount Baker in back. As conspicuous visual icons signifying a region, the volcanoes remain open to imaginative appropriation and elaborate self-definition, yet remain indifferent to human presence. Our behavior near or on them must reflect both the imaginative truth of belonging and the factual truth of existing forever apart and below.