Despite the name, the town of Rainier is not on the mountain. It is a small place in south Thurston County, Washington, strung along State Route 507 between Tenino and Yelm, a farming and commuter town of a couple of thousand people on the prairies south of Puget Sound. On a clear day, though, the mountain it is named after looms on the eastern horizon like a second sky, white and enormous, and you understand the choice.
For a ride heading to Paradise, Rainier is a comfortable place to eat and gather yourself before the bigger roads. The landscape here is open: glacial outwash prairies, oak groves, horse farms and Douglas fir woods, unusual in a region otherwise dominated by dense forest. The gravelly soils were left by meltwater from the ice sheet that covered Puget Sound at the end of the last ice age. Not far to the west near Littlerock, the Mima Mounds, a field of strange, regular humps, are one of the odder geological puzzles in the state.
From here, the road east through Yelm and on to State Route 702 and 7 takes you toward Elbe and Ashford, the gateway villages to Mount Rainier National Park, with the Nisqually River cutting through the valley. The roads are generally good two-lane highways with long, easy curves through timber country, punctuated by log trucks and RVs, and the stretch from Ashford up to Longmire and Paradise climbs steadily through old-growth forest with switchbacks near the top. Paradise sits at about 1,600 metres, and in late spring the snow there can still be piled high along the road.
Practically, there is food and fuel in and around Rainier and Yelm, and Yelm is the larger town if you need anything more. Fuel gets scarcer as you head deeper toward the park, so it is wise to fill up before you leave the prairie. Weather in western Washington changes fast; a grey, drizzly morning can turn into a bright afternoon, and the mountain often makes its own clouds. Summer and early autumn give the most reliable riding, but even in July you should carry a warm layer for the climb, because the air above Ashford can be ten degrees cooler than it is on the prairie.