Months, hours, and the one weather pattern that fools people.
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Join the iOS beta Android coming soonFrom Seattle the clearest stretch is July through September, when the marine layer is thin and most days deliver the mountain by mid-morning. June is the trap: the sun is up seventeen hours but the low cloud often does not burn off until afternoon, if at all.
October and November bring inversions. Seattle sits under fog while the mountain stands above it in sun, so a grey morning in the city can be the best view of the year from Tacoma or the Eastside. That is exactly the case the region pages here are built for.
December through February the mountain is out a few days a month, usually the cold clear days after a front. Spring is a coin flip until late May.
Whatever the month, the two hours to watch are the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset. Sunset lands on the west face, the one you see from Seattle.
Reading the airports along the sightline.
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Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, Mount Baker, Denali in one app. Picks the mountain nearest you, reads your part of the region, and tells you when it is out. $0.99 once. No account, no ads, your location stays on your phone.
We read the cloud ceilings at the airports between Seattle and the summit, the cloud layers at the summit from the MET Norway model, and whether that cloud sits below 14,410 ft. No crowd reports.
Cloud forecasts stop being useful after about three days. A ten-day visibility forecast is a calendar with random numbers on it.
Different weather stations, different sky. The same morning can be fog in one and clear in the other, twenty miles apart. Each region page reads its own stations.
Wildfire smoke and haze can hide the mountain on a day the cloud numbers say clear. When the numbers are unsure, the page says so.
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