Paradise at Mt. Rainier

It has not rained in Seatle for 49 days. 51 is the record set in 1951. We have a 3 day trip planned to stay at Paradise Inn at Mt. Rainier and the weather reports are for rain tomorrow and monday!!
We set off early to go to Tacoma on the way to see some art - the Marioni family at the Tacoma Art Museum and amazing Lino Tagliapietra at the Museum of Glass. Both excellent and worthy of blip and more, but.......on to Mt. Rainier.
It started out a beautiful day but the closer we got to the mountain, the more clouds were moving in. Mt. Rainier was the 5th National Park formed in 1899(I think there are 46 now?)by a Seattle businessman who became the head of the National Park Service, but also persuaded some Seattle businessmen to invest in a lodge at 5,000 ft up this 14,410 ft. mountain for a place for hikers and climbers to stay. This rustic lodge was built from local materials in 1916, but later (1952) the National Park Service bought it and runs it. It's a wonderfully inviting place, with no cell phone service, no internet and no television. Just nature. It was closed in 2006 for 2 years for extensive renovation and to earthquake proof it. It gets buried under 17 ft of snow every winter and also suffers from many small tremors from the active volcano it sits upon. There are many international students employed there - we were served in the dining room by "kids" from Ghana, Turkey and Rumania.
This picture is taken out the window of the annex built a few years later , because I thought I better try to catch the mountain shortly after we arrived (5pm) before it disappeared from the landscape behind the cloud which was slowly descending. The wing of the Inn you see is the dining hall with the original tiny guest rooms above it. I finally found something to use the "grainy black and white" setting on the camera, because it seemed to fit in with many of the black and white photos all over the walls there, depicting the early activities there in the park - dog sled rides, horseback rides, woman climbing in long skirts etc. We met H's brother and s-i-l before dinner - they drove from Durango CO with all their hiking gear - they are attempting to stay at most of the National Park Lodges...and made this reservation last fall, asking if we'd like to join them here then. Yes!!