The mountain takes its name from Josiah 'Uncle Si' Merritt, a homesteader who settled in the valley in the 1860s. Merritt was apparently quite a character - accounts describe him as the archetypal mountain man, bearded and colorful, the sort of figure who gets mountains named after him. His neighbor, Little Si, stands to the south. The names stuck even as the valley transformed from wilderness to logging country to bedroom community. Today North Bend sits at the mountain's base, a town that reinvented itself around Twin Peaks tourism and the outlet malls that draw shoppers from Seattle. But the mountain doesn't care about television or shopping. It just sits there, dominating the view from I-90, inviting people to climb.

To the Snoqualmie people, Mount Si carries a different story. In their tradition, the mountain is the fallen body of Moon - the paramount deity in Snoqualmie religion. According to the legend, Moon ordered a rope of cedar bark to be stretched between Earth and sky. Coyote and Blue Jay climbed the rope, with Blue Jay pecking a hole through the sky for Coyote to pass through. Coyote transformed into a beaver but got trapped in one of Moon's beaver traps. He played dead until Moon brought him home and skinned him. The story continues from there, a trickster tale involving fire theft and the moon's death - Mount Si as divine corpse, watching over the valley where the Snoqualmie once lived and fished and told these stories.

The trail is relentless but straightforward - four miles of steady switchbacks through second-growth forest, gaining elevation like a stairmaster set to cruel. Most hikers turn around at the summit ridge, satisfied with the views of the Snoqualmie Valley and the Olympics beyond. The truly committed scramble up the Haystack, the rocky prominence that gives Mount Si its distinctive profile, where exposure and loose rock add real danger to what is otherwise a family hike. The mountain sits low enough that snow rarely lingers - you can climb year-round, though winter brings ice and mud. In favorable conditions, some people actually ski the summit, though the mountain doesn't hold snow well.

Mount Si is not a volcano - not anymore. The rocks are remnants of an oceanic plate volcano, heavily metamorphosed over millions of years, pushed up along the western margin of the Cascades. The metagabbro that forms the peak dates to the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary, when dinosaurs still ruled the Earth. This is old rock, the geological foundation underlying the younger volcanic Cascades to the east. From the summit, you can see Mount Rainier floating on the southern horizon, an active volcano that could erupt any decade. Mount Si is done with such drama. It just sits there, patient as it has been for a hundred million years, waiting for the next hiker to climb its trail.