With your experiences, do you even contemplate what’s going to happen to you when Rainer goes active and erupts; avalanches, landslides, floods, lahars, large pyroclastic flows?
I live at the 415 foot level on a hill above the lahar flood plains. In fact the lahar evacuation signs point up my hill. And the normal prevailing winds would carry most of the ash another direction.
History shows we don’t need an eruption. Mount Rainier has an active hydrothermal system, which acts like an acidic sauna that essentially steams the mountain’s rocky interior into soft, gooey clay. The rock eventually becomes so weak that it can collapse under it own weight. There are also 25 glaciers on the mountain, covering some 36 square miles with an average depth of 100 feet of ice. This ice does its share of damage, freezing and expanding, slowly eroding the volcanic rocks, and dripping melted water into the acidic interior.
Looking at Mount Rainier, you might think there is a large chunk missing from the top. You would be right. Apparently, some 5,600 years ago, the summit collapsed and turned into one of the biggest mudflows in history. This lahar, called the Osceola mudflow, was so big and fluid that it traveled at least 100 miles before stopping in Puget Sound. An ancient forest of vast trees — some ten to fifteen feet wide — covered the valley floors, but did little to slow the powerful flow.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/savageplanet/01volcano/03/indexmid.html