[ The Score | The View | The Mountain | Notes From Away | Greatest Hits | The Works ]

If you live around Puget Sound you already know the question. If you don't, here's how it works. Mount Rainier is 60 miles from my attic window, and it is the biggest thing you will ever see, and most days you can't see it at all. When the clouds lift and there it is, people here say "the mountain is out." They say it at work, at the gas station, on the radio. You hang up the phone with your sister and the last thing she says is "Did you see? The mountain's out."

So I put a camera in the window. I'm a drafter at a civil engineering firm here in town (roads, storm drains, a lot of culverts), and I've spent twenty years drawing things exactly as they are. This seemed like the same job with less erasing. The camera has been on the air since Saturday, February 6, 1999.

The YES or NO at the top is me. I change it by hand when I get home from work and on weekends, so if the sign says one thing and the camera says another, believe the camera. My wife Paula says I should let the computer decide. I say the computer doesn't know a cloud from a glacier, and neither, some afternoons, do I.

THE SCORE, 1999
A day counts as OUT if the summit shows in even one frame, first light to dark. I go through them every night. Paula says this is not a hobby, it's a condition.

That's about 4 days in 10. March was the worst month, which surprised nobody. June was a disappointment, which also surprised nobody who has lived here more than one June. August was the best, and on a lot of those August days the mountain was out but hazy, a pale ghost of itself, and I counted them anyway. Rules are rules.

THE VIEW, A KEY
The camera faces southeast out of the gable window of our attic. The house was built in 1910 and sits on the hill in the North End, which is why we can see anything at all. From the bottom of the picture to the top:

THE MOUNTAIN, IN BRIEF

• 14,410 feet. The highest peak in Washington and in the Cascades.
• Glaciers. More glacier ice than any other mountain in the lower 48. The Emmons Glacier, on the northeast side, is the biggest glacier in the lower 48 by area. In late summer, like now, the winter snow has melted off and you can see the glaciers themselves, gray and blue and cracked, with dark rock ridges between them. In January it's all just white.
• Paradise is on the south side, at about 5,400 feet, with the old lodge and the wildflower meadows. It gets a tremendous amount of snow in winter.
• Sunrise is on the northeast side, at about 6,400 feet, the highest point you can drive to in the park. The view of the Emmons Glacier from there is worth the drive.
• It's a volcano. People ask. Yes. It's quiet. I keep an eye on it anyway, as you can see.

NOTES FROM AWAY
The best part of this whole thing has been the mail from people who had never heard the expression. A few, with permission:

GREATEST HITS
The camera writes over its own picture every five minutes, so I save the good ones by hand.

Sunday, January 24, 1999, 7:41 a.m. The first good frame this camera ever took, a week before the page went up, while I was still figuring out which way was up. Clear and about 25 degrees, frost on every roof, the streetlights still on, and the mountain going pink in the first light while the rest of us were still in the dark. I was standing next to the computer in my bathrobe, yelling for Paula. If the camera never takes another picture, it paid for itself that morning.

Friday, March 12, 1999, 10:05 a.m. The other greatest hit, by sheer number of performances. Drizzle, low cloud, no foothills, no mountain, a little water on the glass. I put this one up so visitors from out of state know what a normal day looks like and don't think the camera is broken. It isn't. The mountain is just in.

THE WORKS

One tip if you try this yourself: the camera fogs up from the inside of the glass on cold mornings. A little space heater in the attic fixed it. So did waiting until ten o'clock.