Mount Rainier towers above its surroundings. The 360-degree view from its summit is stunning, encompassing Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains to the west, Mount Baker far to the north, the Columbia River country to the east, spreading south toward Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Hood down in Oregon. I saw all of this on a perfectly clear summit day and having done so makes me appreciate the approach Jeff Antonelis-Lapp takes in this book.

The mountain and its national park connect to all the surrounding country in many ways, and Tahoma and its People explains in a readable way how this is so. Antonelis-Lapp is a science and environmental educator who has explored, studied, and taught about Mount Rainier National Park for decades. The genesis of his book was a literature search of broad scope about the mountain and park that he could use in his teaching. The literature is large but narrowly focused, so he decided to write his own book that would present his subjects in an interdisciplinary way. Tahoma and its People introduces very well the complex natural and human histories of this amazing place.

He begins with the early years – very early – tracing and summarizing the geologic history of the mountain from collision of tectonic plates 50 to 60 million years ago, through mountain building episodes of the past million years, to the mammoth Osceola Mudflow a mere 5,600 years ago.

Summarizing a complex geologic history is daunting but Antonelis-Lapp does so cleverly. He uses, among other devices, a clock that illustrates the sequence of events that over the last 500,000 years made the mountain what it is today. This geologic story is not just about the mountain, but about the glaciers on the mountain and the streams that flow from them into the lowlands connecting it to its surroundings, an approach he uses throughout.

“An explosive lateral blast collapsed the uppermost section of the mountain’s northeast side at 11:44 p.m., 5,600 years ago.” The lahar “surged out of the foothills and into the lowlands” and swept through the current cities of Auburn and Kent into Puget Sound.

The point is clear – the mountain has power over all that surrounds it, including modern cities, and Antonelis-Lapp explains how this is so today with lesser mudflows and the influence of rivers originating on the mountain on the lowlands. The prospect of a major event like that of the Osceola Mudflow is today very much on the minds of people living on ancient lahars.

The “and its People” of the title includes people past and present, especially the indigenous people who have lived around Tahoma for thousands of years, and more recent arrivals who live in the paths of lahars and along the rivers descending from the mountain. Antonelis-Lapp knows the modern indigenous people well, working among them for many years, and in the second chapter he introduces them. A modern misconception has been that indigenous people stayed away from the mountain, fearing it, but archaeology and ethnology dispel this notion. Antonelis-Lapp writes:

A little more than 50 years ago, Mount Rainier’s precontact record consisted of a small collection of isolated finds enveloped in a cloud of misunderstanding about the presence of Native Americans on the mountain. The sustained cooperation of local Indian tribes, park staff, and other experts prevailed in dispelling the mistaken idea that indigenous people avoided mountainous terrain. For over 9000 years at more than 100 locations, native people have hunted marmots, mountain goats, and other game. They have gathered huckleberries, bear grass, and other plants. Tahoma’s archaeology now places people on all sides of the mountain, encircling it like shell beads on a necklace, becoming ever more valuable as new finds are added with each passing year.

Later in the book Antonelis-Lapp explains how the mountain affected “its people” in another way. The cultural construction of the “national park” required exclusion of indigenous people who had used the area for millennia. This led to hard feelings but he assures us that, in a more culturally conscious time, things are improving on this front. Today, downstream from the mountain, tribes work with others to protect and restore parts of Mount Rainier’s watersheds and he documents how this is happening.

These first two chapters have explored deep time dimensions, geological and human, and next the book moves to a more spatial approach traveling clockwise around the mountain. The Nisqually, Puyallup, and Carbon rivers originate on the mountain, in the park, and flow west to the lowlands. Antonelis-Lapp uses the three major watersheds to organize facts about natural and human history of the region and how the dynamics of the mountain affect its surroundings. Take, for instance, the Nisqually River watershed, the first of the three. The river emerges from the Nisqually Glacier and descends through the most-visited part of the park, the Paradise and Longmire areas.

A wonderful map illustrates the terminus position of the Nisqually Glacier that since 1840 has retreated 2.5 miles. Paradise subalpine meadows put on one of the world’s showiest displays of wildflowers, and Antonelis-Lapp mentions that John Muir was drawn to the meadows in 1888 and soon found himself atop the peak, among its earliest climbers.

Concern for these meadows grows today as global climate change throws off timing for the denizens of the meadows (“phenological change”), and a growing crush of visitors threaten the meadows in many ways. Development downstream has changed the river, forcing increasingly drastic measures to protect people from floods and to restore fish like salmon that have used the river for millennia to sustain their populations. Habitats and species dependent upon the rivers are threatened, and Antonelis-Lapp describes efforts to restore rare prairie habitat on the lower reaches of the Nisqually watershed. Some of the best habitat, ironically, is on Joint Base Lewis-McChord, an Army and Air Force complex, where the military is working with others to sustain and restore critical habitat.

Tidbits of natural history are scattered throughout the book, mixed with descriptions of work being done outside the park along the riverine tentacles to deal with problems created by early settlers who diked estuaries and channelized the river. This is a unique approach to describing the “natural history” of a national park, because much of what Antonelis-Lapp describes is outside the boundary of the park, but the park is the hub of the region and what it protects offers both inspiration and opportunity to right wrongs against the natural history downstream. He never moralizes but reveals the nature of Mount Rainier’s big shadow, issues that have risen there, and efforts being undertaken to address problems.

The author injects himself into the story throughout, never for long, allowing him to describe his encounters with scientists, park managers, and others who have helped him probe the mysteries and wonders of the place – biologists, geologists, archaeologists, and park rangers. These personal anecdotes allow Antonelis-Lapp to express in subtle ways his deep sense and love of the Mount Rainier region. As an outdoorsman, naturalist, and educator working and playing on and near the mountain for decades, he was drawn under its spell and enjoyed many exciting adventures as he sought to know it as fully as he could. For example, he joins a crew surveying for endangered northern spotted owls, and they find some.

The crew plays digital recordings of spotted owl calls; we listen intently for them to answer. No response. We walk toward a known nest site while playing more digital recordings. Still nothing. After more fruitless tries, a distant hoot returns, eerily reverberating through the forest. Without a word, the three crew members bolt off on a dead run in its direction. By the time I catch up to them, breathless, they’ve located an adult male northern spotted owl. It sits on a limb about 25 feet up a tree and about a hundred feet away. Known to be curious about humans and easily approachable, it stares at us. We gawk back.

This sighting launches a description of the owl’s dependence on old growth forests, which are rare today, touches on the issue of defining old growth, why the species is endangered, and what is being done to try and recover it. Efforts so far are not working, and he probes why that might be. Antonelis-Lapp uses this approach throughout the book, moving from personal experience to description and explanation, and it works well.

One delightful part of this book is the selection of natural history stories he shares. Rufous and calliope hummingbirds join bees and flies to pollinate the profusion of wildflowers in the mountain meadows. Nests of the marbled murrelet, a small seabird delightfully called the “fogbird,” eluded detection for over a century until one was found high in an old-growth tree in northern California. They fly up to 55 miles inland to nest, “flying a minimum of 73 miles per day to feed their young” and nesting in the park’s old growth. Clark’s nutcrackers “sport a classic tuxedo, there’s no sharper-dressed bird on the mountain.”

These members of the jay family have a mutualist relationship with whitebark pines, depending on the tree for food while dispersing its seeds across the montane landscape and assuring tree reproduction. This is important because the pines are suffering from a blister rust epidemic, mountain pine beetle infestations, and other stressors. Antonelis-Lapp observes that “The cascading effects of the loss of this subalpine tree could be far-reaching and ecologically calamitous” and the tree “is at the center of an evolving story in a complex web dictated by time, natural processes, and human intervention.” He marvels at the wonders and beauty of nature in the park and its surroundings while revealing problems and how they are or are not being effectively addressed.

Like Jeff Antonelis-Lapp, I studied and taught about Pacific Northwest mountains for decades, in my case north of Mount Rainier, often in North Cascades National Park. I love those mountains as he does Mount Rainier. Much of the natural history up there is similar to his mountain, though nothing in the North Cascades has the monumental impact of one huge mountain standing out above everything else, dominating the landscape in so many ways. A glimpse of Mount Rainier soaring above the clouds literally knocks a person over with wonder while the jumble of spectacular North Cascade peaks takes a bit longer to do so. Many of the plants and animals and natural processes he describes occur there too. I gained new insights and understanding from Tahoma and its People of northwest mountains and the rivers they spawn while appreciating the selection of material he chose to include in the book. There is so much!

The reader of Tahoma and its People should have a detailed map of the Mount Rainier area handy. I thought I knew the area, but I found consulting the National Geographic Trails Illustrated map of Mount Rainier National Park very helpful in following Antonelis-Lapp’s journey. While there are good maps in the book illustrating archaeological sites, watersheds, watershed projects, and other specific areas, a more detailed map of the park and its surroundings helped me follow more closely what he was describing and explaining. Such visual detail is not possible to include in a paperback book like this.

Full disclosure: Over four decades ago Jeff Antonelis-Lapp was one of my students at Western Washington University’s Huxley College of the Environment. He was a student of environmental and science education and went on to a fine career in those fields. Reading his book has been a delight and an especially satisfying experience for me. As Jeff well knows, an educator can never be sure what the fruits of his efforts might be. While I can take no credit for the quality of the work in this book, it is especially satisfying to see the fruits of this author’s labors and know I had a small part in making such a fine work possible.