Five Modern Highways to Majestic Rainier

The Washington State Advertising Commission was the state's tourism-promotion body in the years before wartime gasoline and rubber rationing ended the era of the pleasure drive. The slogan in the lower right — "It's COOL, It's GREEN, It's GREAT" — pitched Washington directly to visitors from warmer, drier states. The mountain's elevation is printed as 14,408 feet, the figure derived from earlier barometric surveys; GPS-era measurements now read 14,411. The park acreage is given as 241,782 — somewhat higher than today's official 235,625 acres, most likely reflecting boundary adjustments made in the decades since.

The lake in the cover photograph is almost certainly Reflection Lakes — a pair of small tarns on the south side of the park, accessible from the Paradise road, that offered visitors a still-water mirror image of the volcano. A boat concession ran there from 1927 onward; by the 1930s the site was one of the park's most visited stops. The secondary jagged ridge visible to Rainier's left is likely the Tatoosh Range, which frames the view from the south side.

The "five modern highways" mentioned on the yellow strip are the paved approach roads entering the park from different directions. Road construction at Mount Rainier expanded significantly through the 1920s and 1930s, and New Deal programs — the Civilian Conservation Corps established eight camps in the park — added labor and materials. By the late 1930s, annual visitation was measured in the hundreds of thousands, and automobile access was the dominant way people arrived.

The sedan in the foreground — rounded, streamlined, with fenders beginning to blend into the body — matches the American car silhouette of roughly 1939–1941, when manufacturers moved from the fully separate fender toward a more integrated body. By 1942 rubber rationing and fuel restrictions had made road-trip tourism brochures effectively obsolete for the duration of the war, placing this piece squarely in the pre-war automobile age.