Hweqwidi Hanford McCloud remembers the Nisqually River of his childhood as large and cold, bustling with so many salmon it was almost pathetic, he said.
Elders warned him it wouldn’t be like that forever, and to enjoy it while it lasted.
“They were right,” he said.
The river has changed drastically since his youth, he told The News Tribune. The water has grown increasingly warm and the salmon are dwindling, throwing all life that depends on them off balance, he said.
McCloud, a Nisqually tribal member and a liaison for the Nisqually Tribal Council, said the tribe has a sacred connection with the Nisqually River and its source, Mount Rainier — which they call Tahoma, meaning “where the water begins.” The Nisqually River is fed by the Nisqually and Wilson glaciers on the southwest side of Mount Rainier — like other glaciers on the mountain, both are facing ice loss at increasingly faster rates due to climate change.
McCloud and others in the South Sound say the changing climate is impacting how they interact with Mount Rainier. Hikers, climbers, tribal members and artists told The News Tribune how their relationship with the mountain has changed as its glaciers have started to disappear.
Already, certain features of the mountain have disappeared, such as the once well-known Paradise ice caves, which closed to the public around 1980 after progressive melting destabilized the ice tunnels forming in Paradise Glacier.
Retired research librarian and mountain hiking hobbyist Dawn Nanfito told The News Tribune Mount Rainier is part of why she loves living in Tacoma.
After decades hiking Mount Rainier and living in the area, Nanfito said it would be strange to see the mountain bare of its glaciers someday.
“This, over my shoulder, is something I cross stitched of Mount Rainier; this up here is a pennant that my friend gave me from an antique store; this is a picture from Indian Henry’s Hunting Ground,” she said, showing a News Tribune reporter mementos of the mountain around her home. “It’s what you look for all the time when you drive on a nice day.”
Nanfito responded to a News Tribune survey calling for submissions of photos of Mount Rainier over different periods of time. A comparison of two photos submitted by Nanfito, each depicting a similar view of Emmons Glacier — the largest glacier on Mount Rainier — shows far more ice in August 1997 than in September 2024. She took the photos from hikes on the Burroughs Mountain trail.
Nanfito also shared photos that show the retreat of ice at the edges of Emmons Glacier. She took those photos from the Glacier Basin trail at Mount Rainier National Park in August 1996 and in September 2022.
Harrison Laird, a commercial real estate broker who has summited Mount Rainier dozens of times, told The News Tribune he has already seen many changes in his 18 years of climbing the mountain.
His first climb was through the popular Disappointment Cleaver route, which goes through Ingraham Glacier, in 2007. He said back then, the route was covered in deep snow in July, which made route-finding easier by hiking up snow. Over time, he said he’s seen the snow retreat, exposing more bare rock and making climbs trickier and more dangerous as climbers try to avoid rockfalls.
Laird said he has also noticed significant retreat in the Nisqually Glacier over the past two decades, where he also enjoys climbing the Nisqually Icefall route. Watching the mountain change can be grim, he said. He said the face of the mountain appears changed in views from afar as well.
“There’s a sadness there. It’s definitely not going to be, not going to be the same,” Laird said. “Get while the getting is good, I guess, is how it makes me feel.” ‘What we perceive as normal is what my late father was concerned about.’
The Cowlitz, Muckleshoot, Nisqually, Puyallup, Squaxin Island, Yakama and Coast Salish indigenous peoples recognize what is now Mount Rainier National Park as their ancestral homelands.
McCloud said he has grown concerned as the Nisqually River’s chum run has begun to falter as the water warms. Cold water is important for salmon populations, which return to cold streams like the glacier-fed Nisqually for spawning, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. According to the EPA, salmon also provide an important food source for other animals in the Puget Sound region. Glacier melt has also caused flood zones to change, sometimes altering the trajectory of the river, McCloud said.
“Earth is warming up … no longer is it going through those stages of cold, to warm, to hot — it’s going straight from cold to hot, and it’s messing up the system,” McCloud said. “It’s showing in not only the wildlife animals if you watch the salmon, (but) orcas, and the eagles.”
The river and mountain remain important to the Nisqually Tribe and their traditions of fishing, gathering and canoeing in the summer, McCloud said. Those traditions stretch back thousands of years and continue to be passed on to younger tribal members, he said, connecting them with the land.
Warren KingGeorge, historian for the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, told The News Tribune the Muckleshoot Tribe also has significant tradition and heritage tied to the White River, which is fed by Emmons Glacier on Mount Rainier. The Muckleshoot call the mountain Ta Ko Ba — or Təqʷúʔməʔ in the Lushootseed language — which translates to “the water repeats,” he said, pointing to the source of the river.
The Muckleshoot have lived and fished along the White River for thousands of years, KingGeorge said. He said the river has long been known for a swift and wild personality, which could cause its path to change constantly when natural debris blocked certain segments. Over the past few decades, however, the river has been experiencing lower water levels and lessened fish populations, he said, adding that some side channels and the intensity of the river have disappeared over time.
“(Some people) actually can drive across the river in certain places at certain times of the year,” he said. “That was never the case when I was a boy, the river was much bigger … you wouldn’t dare try to drive your vehicle across.”
The Muckleshoot also depend on the White River for their annual spring Chinook fishery, where they fish salmon for subsistence; Chinook salmon are a staple of the Muckleshoot diet today and traditionally, KingGeorge said. He said the loss of the river and its salmon would chip away at a long-standing part of Muckleshoot identity.
Fishing represents a rite of passage for young adults of the tribe, whose coming of age is celebrated with their own salmon gillnet and the preparation of salmon for consumption, he said. He said the Muckleshoot are concerned about the future of the river and the wildlife and traditions it supports. His late father was already concerned about threats to salmon populations years ago, and would have found today’s level of salmon disconcerting, he said.
“What we perceive as normal is what my late father was concerned about,” KingGeorge said. “... You’ve got to be able to distinguish between what’s normal and what’s not normal.”
The Nisqually also visit the Mount Rainier area to gather bark, shrubs and berries — including cedar bark, cattail and beargrass — both for medicinal and weaving purposes, McCloud added. McCloud said he has sought to maintain Nisqually cedar bark weaving traditions by learning to weave hats, which he gifts and sells.
“Those three shrubs are a big part of who we are here as weavers within the Nisqually area,” he said.
The Muckleshoot prefer to mostly keep off of the mountain out of respect, KingGeorge said, but also make exceptions to gather natural materials such as cedar bark and berries.
He added he has seen animals begin to behave strangely as the climate has changed. He said a herd of elk, for example, have recently begun coming further down the mountain along the White River to feed in closer proximity to humans.
A snow-covered Mount Rainier has long been an iconic symbol of Pierce County. It’s depicted on signs, seals and murals across the greater Tacoma area.
Graphic designer and art director Chuck Pennington created Pierce County’s logo. Now retired, Pennington told The News Tribune the Pierce County Council hired him to simplify and standardize the logo in the 1980s — different departments had previously used different variations of a seal depicting Mount Rainier, many of which were complex and based on historic engravings.
One of the first designs he did ended up as the final artwork — a simple sketch of five white triangles to represent Mount Rainier’s ice, pointing in a downward-left direction and arranged to outline multiple peaks. The triangles rest on a simple blue background, suggesting a clear sky behind the mountain, he added.
The snow is a defining feature of the view of the mountain, which in turn, is a major, recognizable landmark locally and nationally, he said.
“I wanted it to appear, you know, pretty striking and strong,” Pennington said. “.... There’s only one place where there’s a Mount Rainier.”
He said people reacted positively to his redesign, and the depiction of Mount Rainier’s icy outline over negative space has held up well for nearly forty years. He said he hopes the mountain doesn’t lose enough snow in the coming years to make the logo outdated.
Other artists have worked to depict Rainier to draw attention to the need to protect its changing landscape. Claire Giordano, an environmental artist and educator, said glaciers are a visceral and visible indicator of climate change, which encouraged her to focus on them in her art. Giordano, who holds a bachelor of arts in environmental studies, said she both uses historical photographs and goes out on hikes to capture differences in the glaciers over time.
One of her pieces depicts change in the Nisqually Glacier from 1890 to 2018 with the help of crowdsourced photos of the same views of the glaciers; that project helped bring attention to the differences people can see in the glaciers over their own lifetimes, she said.
Giordano said she hopes her art encourages people to appreciate the significance of the loss of ice and to consider other visible environmental changes that can cause. She intentionally painted her Nisqually Glacier artwork in black and white to emphasize the stark contrast of the glacier’s white ice patterns changing against the mountainside, she said.
“That’s one reason why I find Mount Rainier so fascinating, especially in the last few years, because as these glaciers recede and as so much more snow melts every year, it is incredibly visible to me, whether I’m up close, hiking on the mountain or far away … you can see how much more rock and exposed mountain there is with no snow or ice covering it,” Giordano said.
It has been humbling and saddening to watch how the loss of ice has begun to turn parts of the mountain murky brown, especially during peak heat seasons, she said. Giordano said she will continue to find the mountain beautiful as it changes, but in a different way — now as pockets of ice rather than expansive ranges.
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