Seattle and Tacoma have long enjoyed views of Mount Rainier that are so striking, they’ve become iconic. At 14,410 feet tall, the volcanic peak towers over the central Cascade mountain range and boasts the largest glacial system outside of Alaska.
On clear days, when it gleams white in the skyline, locals say “the Mountain is out.”
But lately, people familiar with that view have noticed it changing. Especially around the middle, it looks much darker – the color of rock instead of snow.
Climate change is melting glaciers and causing them to retreat all around the world. And you can now see that happening in the views of Mount Rainier, said glaciologist Mauri Pelto. He said this year’s very dry summer has left the mountain’s shrinking glaciers exposed.
“All the snowpack that had formed on the surface during the winter of 2025, you know, is gone,” he said.
Pelto is a professor at Nichols College in Massachusetts. He is the director of the North Cascade Glacier Climate Project there. He began monitoring 47 glaciers in Washington’s North Cascades more than four decades ago. 12 of them have since disappeared.
Pelto keeps an eye on Mount Rainier through satellite imagery and said a big change started in the summer of 2021, when the record heat dome in the Northwest melted much of the perennial snowpack between Rainier’s glaciers.
And in the summers since, he said nighttime temperatures have been so warm, that the melting never stops.
“It just isn't getting cold enough at night for the surface to refreeze,” Pelto said. “And so when you look at the mountain today, you will see that it's barer in that 10- to 13,000-foot elevation range than it is down around 8,000 feet.”
He said some of Rainier’s glaciers that are still visible from Seattle - like the Carbon and North Mowich glaciers - appear darker as well, because of the debris they carry.
T.J. Fudge, an associate professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington, studies glaciers around the world and said they are shrinking or disappearing pretty much everywhere because of climate change.
Another factor that might be at play on Mount Rainier, Fudge said, is rockfall.
“One of the processes that happens when the glaciers start to shrink is that they've actually been kind of holding up the rock around them. And so as they shrink, you then have rock that becomes somewhat less stable, and you can get rock falls. And so that may be contributing to more darkness and exposed rock as well,” Fudge said.
Fudge said it’s possible the recent precipitation that quenched the region in mid-August provided some coverage. That might temporarily restore the views many people here are accustomed to, but not for long.
Still, he said the colder temps at Mount Rainier’s higher elevations will preserve some of the glaciers.
“The glaciers that are there are going to continue to exist long into the future,” Fudge said, even as some at lower elevations recede or disappear.
And he said, even those that remain will change a lot in size. “And kind of - not extend as far down into the valleys as they did in the past.”
Pelto expects in the future, for at least three months of the year, Mount Rainier will no longer be gleaming white with snow – people can expect to see more gray and brown rock instead.
