The Great Flood at Mt Rainier National Park

Maybe it's because of my roots as an interpreter in the Park Service that I love a slide show. The folks at Mt Rainier National Park have put together a new and extensive 47 piece slide show that is available online. The subject of the show is the recent heavy flooding which has destroyed much of the man-made infrastructure of the park. This includes roads, campgrounds, buildings, bridges and trails. There are some dramatic photos in here: houses teetering on the edge of the river, giant roadway washouts, re-defined river boundaries, rockfall landslides, trees that have crashed through picnic tables, and water, water, everywhere. The money needed to fix all this damage is currently estimated at $30 million bucks. Having seen the photos in that slide show, I can imagine that figure is probably pretty accurate.

The Slide Show:
The Great Flood of November 2006 [pdf approx 5mb]

Quoted from the last slide in the presentation:
"Mount Rainier is a restless mountain. The roads, bridges, trails, and campgrounds we build are secondary to the elemental forces that created'and continue to transform'this landscape we love. Our great works of human enterprise will fade away with time. The mountain will endure."

If you are interested in more photos and even some video, the park has set up an webpage which has a lot of media to pour over. The page "Images of the Flood of 2006" includes at least 3 video segments (in wmv format), 4 web-based photo albums, and includes the slide show linked above in both PDF and PowerPoint formats.