Mount Rainier is built on the foundations of much older mountains. Long before Mount Rainier formed, volcanoes 26-28 million years ago spread great blankets of hot pumice and ash over the landscape. Some flows were 350 feet thick. Heat trapped in the flows remelted the particles, forming the hard rock, known as welded tuff, of the Stevens Ridge Formation, which forms the peaks of the Tatoosh Range visible to the south. From beneath these rocks a large blob of magma many miles across pushed upward about 18-14 million years ago. Before it reached the surface, the molten rock cooled and hardened into a "salt and pepper" crystalline rock, known as granodiorite – a relative of granite. Granodiorite forms the base rocks under both the Tatoosh Range and Mount Rainier. As the entire Cascade Mountain Range rose, severe erosion carved rocks of the Tatoosh into the rugged ridges and deep valleys we see. In the last million years, repeated glaciation shaped the range into a series of horns and cirques.
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Itineraries across USA
Acadia
Arches National Park
Badlands
Big Bend
Biscayne
Black Canyon Of The Gunnison
Bryce Canyon
Canyonlands
Capitol Reef
Carlsbad Caverns
Channel Islands
Congaree
Crater Lake
Cuyahoga Valley
Death Valley
Dry Tortugas
Everglades
Gateway Arch
Glacier
Grand Canyon
Grand Teton
Great Basin
Great Smoky Mountains
Guadalupe Mountains
Haleakalā
Hawaiʻi Volcanoes
Hot Springs
Indiana Dunes
Isle Royale
Joshua Tree
Kenai Fjords
Kobuk Valley
Lassen Volcanic
Mammoth Cave
Mesa Verde
Mount Rainier
North Cascades
Olympic
Petrified Forest
Pinnacles
Rocky Mountain
Saguaro
Shenandoah
Theodore Roosevelt
Virgin Islands
Voyageurs
White Sands
Wind Cave
Yellowstone
Yosemite
Zion