One of the small benefits of being a national park enthusiast is that you sometimes shake your friends out of their lethargy.

Eighteen months ago, a friend of mine moved from the Midwest to Seattle. He loved the town, the coffee, his job. He admired the immense mountain hovering on the southeast horizon, and he always meant to drive out there and see it face to face. But he never did.

Then I told him I was coming out and wondered if he’d be interested in a daytrip down to Mount Rainier National Park. “Heck yeah,” he said.

It was a farther drive than he had thought – some two and a half hours from the city – and it was this discovery that first taught him just how big this lonely mountain is. Every day it loomed in his consciousness, vaguely to be reckoned with, and – weirdly – always accessible. So to discover that it was not so close and yet so insistently, dramatically there was a surprise.

It surprised me, too.

I had previously seen Rainier from Puget Sound, on a cruise ship heading out to sea. The farther we pulled away from the city and the smaller the Space Needle shrank, the larger the mountain became. Eventually it crushed every manmade thing below it. Rainier dominated the landscape and emphasized how paltry our little steel and stone creations are.

So I was having my own hard time imaging what it would be like close up. In a way, of course, I lost perspective: When the mountain filled my vision from edge to edge, when I had to turn my head to see from ridge to ridge, it became not just a thing in the world but the world itself.

Rainier makes its own weather, its own ecology. Those of you who live near mountain ranges may see these phenomena as commonplace, but Rainier is more a single entity than a range. It has no visible neighbors. It alone snags the clouds, brings down rain and snow, and – boiling with lava inside – has the potential to create and destroy itself.

We drove up to Paradise, the snow on either side of the road deepening until it was 15 to 20 feet above our heads. Next to the visitors’ center, folks were hiking up the slopes to get a glimpse of the Nisqually Glacier so we headed that way, too.

But we didn’t get very far. A hundred yards out into the snow, my friend was squinting, holding his hands out in front of his face.

“Can you see anything?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“I can’t see anything.”

“Nothing?”

“Maybe those trees. It hurts.”

He was snow blind. We tried to go farther, but it only got worse for him and we retreated to walk the lower woods, out of sight of the high white peak. The mountain he had come to see, that had hung for months on the periphery of his vision, had beckoned and then – at the last moment – hidden itself.

Rainier makes its own rules.