Tagged: Mt. Rainier

Family, fellow law enforcement officers and top government officials paid their respects to National Park Ranger Margaret Anderson at a memorial today. She was fatally shot on Mount Rainier on New Year’s Day after putting up a roadblock to stop a man who blew through a mandatory checkpoint.

As Margaret Anderson’s family was escorted toward the stage lined with her photos, everyone in the packed auditorium at Pacific Lutheran University slowly raised their hands to a salute. The din of bagpipes filled the room to honor the 34-year-old, the first female ranger ever killed in the line of duty. 

A 59-year-old man was taking pictures with his son on a cliff above waterfalls in Mount Rainier when he fell and died.

America's fascination with flying saucers began in Washington state on June 24, 1947. Businessman and pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying his small plane from Chehalis to Yakima when he spotted what appeared to be a formation of nine strange aircraft traveling near Mt. Rainier. Arnold calculated they were flying at supersonic speeds of at least 1,200 miles an hour, something military aircraft of the day were incapable of doing. 

Arnold described the shiny objects as "something like a pie plate that was cut in half with a sort of a convex triangle in the rear" and that they flew "like a saucer if you skipped it across the water." The term "flying saucer" made it into a newspaper headline and the rest, as they say, is history.

With massive flooding in Australia in the news, or earthquakes in South America, perhaps it’s no surprise that 2010 was the most deadly year in a generation for natural disasters around the globe.  What’s the worst we might face here in western Washington?