Several Southwest Washington residents took part when former crewmen of the USS Rainier held their 2016 reunion earlier this month in Vancouver.
That wasn’t the only local angle. You can trace that ship’s name — as well as the names of a couple of its seagoing sisters — back to Vancouver.
And this doesn’t have anything to with Vancouver’s Kaiser Shipyard, which produced about 140 vessels during World War II. (The USS Rainier was built in Tampa, Fla.)
In this case, we’re actually talking about Capt. George Vancouver. His Pacific Coast voyage in 1792 added many names to the British navy’s map of the Northwest, including several mountain peaks.
Capt. Vancouver named Mount Rainier after a fellow British naval officer, Rear Admiral Peter Rainier.
One of Vancouver’s junior officers, Lt. William Broughton, led an expedition up the Columbia River. In addition to naming a point of land on the north shore after Vancouver, Broughton named a peak to the south after another British admiral, Samuel Hood.
Further north, Capt. Vancouver named Mount Baker after the junior officer who discovered it, Joseph Baker.
But for many Navy veterans, Rainier, Mount Hood and Mount Baker bring more to mind than the clean snowy slopes of the Cascade Range.
Those peaks are volcanoes. And the U.S. Navy named one particular type of vessel after all that explosive potential: ammunition ships.
The recent USS Rainier reunion saluted the second of three U.S. Navy ships to bear that name; it served in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War before engine problems forced its retirement.
But the USS Mount Hood met a much more eruptive fate. It had 3,800 tons of explosives aboard when it blew up in 1944 while at port in the South Pacific.
According to a Navy history site, the blast blew a trough 30 to 40 feet deep in the harbor floor. The explosion killed about 400 men and injured about 370. The blast also damaged several ships, including two escort carriers that had been built at the Kaiser shipyard in Vancouver.
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
