Paradise and Sluiskin Falls

Paradise is a sweep of subalpine meadow on Rainier's south flank at 5,400 feet, the end of the road from the Nisqually Entrance, with the timbered Paradise Inn and the visitor center at its foot and the mountain filling the sky above. In summer the meadows bloom in waves of lupine, paintbrush and avalanche lily, and the Skyline Trail loops up through them toward the ice.

In August 1870 two men made camp beside a waterfall on the Paradise River above here. Hazard Stevens was the son of Isaac Stevens, the governor who had made the treaties of the 1850s; his partner was Philemon Van Trump. Their guide was Sluiskin, a Yakama man who had led them up from the valley of the Cowlitz. He took them to the edge of the snow and would go no farther. The summit, he told them, was no place for people, and before they set out he asked them for a written statement that he had tried to stop them, so that he would not be blamed for their deaths. They climbed on August 17, very likely reaching the crater rim rather than the true summit, spent a freezing night in a steam cave and came down the next day, Van Trump hurt in a fall. Sluiskin, who had expected to mourn them, was astonished to see them. They named the falls by their camp for him.

A stone monument to the climb stands beside the Skyline Trail at Sluiskin Falls, though the falls themselves stay hidden in their narrow canyon. The Paradise Inn dates from 1916.