Kerry Park Seattle: Rainier Odds, Sunset Times & Parking

Kerry Park is a small viewpoint park on the south slope of Queen Anne Hill, at 211 W Highland Drive in Seattle. It is free, open 6 AM to 10 PM, and it frames the Space Needle, downtown, Elliott Bay and, on a clear day, Mount Rainier 60 miles away. That last part is the catch. By our estimate from modeled cloud data, Rainier is clear behind the skyline on only a little more than one evening in four across a full year (28%), and in December and February closer to one in eight.

So the useful questions about Kerry Park are not "is it worth it" (it is) but "will the mountain be there when I arrive" and "what time should I come." This guide answers both with ten years of modeled hourly cloud data and the geometry of the view.

Kerry Park at a Glance

Detail	Kerry Park
Address	211 W Highland Dr, Seattle, WA 98119 (between 2nd and 3rd Ave W)
Hours	6 AM to 10 PM daily (Seattle Parks)
Cost	Free, no reservations for casual visits
Elevation at the railing	About 340 feet above sea level
Distance to the Space Needle	0.8 miles (1.3 km)
Distance to Mt. Rainier's summit	60.6 miles (97.5 km), bearing 152° (south-southeast)
Restrooms	None listed by the parks department

The park has two levels. The famous part is the viewing terrace along Highland Drive. Below it, reached by stairs, is Bayview-Kinnear (Lower Kerry Park), with a large lawn, a play area and a basketball court. If you have kids who are done with skyline photos after four minutes, that is where they go.

How Often Is Mt. Rainier Visible from Kerry Park?

Mt. Rainier is likely visible from Kerry Park in the hour before sunset on about 28% of evenings across a year, roughly 100 evenings, based on ten years of modeled hourly cloud cover. In July that rises to 66% of evenings. In December and February it drops to 11 to 13%.

To get those numbers, we pulled Open-Meteo's historical weather archive of hourly cloud cover for 2016 to 2025 for two grid points: Rainier's summit and Kerry Park. An hour counts as "mountain out" when modeled cloud cover at the summit is 30% or less and low cloud over Queen Anne is 50% or less, so neither the peak nor the near-field marine layer should block the line of sight. These are reanalysis model estimates on a grid several kilometers wide, not camera observations of the mountain, and they ignore haze and wildfire smoke, so treat the percentages as rough odds rather than a count of confirmed sightings. This is a historical count, separate from the live score on our Mt. Rainier forecast, which uses the weighted atmospheric model described on our methodology page.

Month	9 AM	3 PM	Hour before sunset	Mountain-out evenings per month
January	11%	15%	16%	5
February	12%	12%	11%	3
March	11%	13%	15%	4.5
April	20%	17%	18%	5.5
May	19%	15%	25%	8
June	23%	23%	30%	9
July	46%	53%	66%	20.5
August	40%	44%	55%	17
September	28%	33%	37%	11
October	15%	25%	28%	9
November	14%	15%	17%	5
December	9%	13%	13%	4
Year	21%	23%	28%	~101

Two things stand out.

First, the evening wins. From May through November, the hour before sunset beats both morning and mid-afternoon every month, often by a wide margin, and in December it ties the afternoon. In October, a 3 PM visit and a 9 AM visit are not close: 25% versus 15%. The pattern is consistent with how Puget Sound weather usually behaves: marine stratus pushes in overnight and burns off through the day, and afternoon cloud over the Cascades often thins as the sun drops.

Second, a gray morning in summer does not rule out the evening. On the 128 July days in the data when Queen Anne was overcast (80% or more modeled cloud) at 9 AM, the mountain-out conditions were met at sunset 52% of the time. In August it was about 42%. From November through March it drops to 4 to 8%, likely because a gray winter morning is more often a frontal system than a marine layer that will burn off. If you are in Seattle in July and wake up to gray skies, do not cancel the evening plan. Check again at 4 PM. Our explainer on what "the mountain is out" means covers why Seattle treats this as news.

Kerry Park Sunset vs. Sunrise: Why Evening Light Wins

Kerry Park is a sunset viewpoint. The view faces south-southeast, so at sunset the sun is behind your right shoulder, lighting the skyline and the mountain from the front. At sunrise in winter, the sun comes up to the left of the Needle and shines straight into your lens, turning Rainier into a flat, hazy silhouette.

The sun's position at Kerry Park through the year:

Date (2026)	Sunrise	Sunrise direction	Sunset	Sunset direction	End of civil twilight
March 20	7:12 AM	89° (east)	7:23 PM	271° (west)	7:53 PM
June 21	5:12 AM	53° (northeast)	9:11 PM	307° (northwest)	9:52 PM
July 15	5:27 AM	56° (northeast)	9:03 PM	304° (northwest)	9:42 PM
October 16	7:30 AM	103° (east-southeast)	6:19 PM	257° (west-southwest)	6:50 PM
December 21	7:55 AM	125° (southeast)	4:20 PM	235° (southwest)	4:56 PM

Rainier sits at 152° from the park. Even on the winter solstice, the sun rises 27° to the left of it, so the sun never rises behind the mountain from Kerry Park. The moon cannot either: it would need to be farther south in the sky than its orbit ever takes it. Photos of the sun cresting Rainier were taken from somewhere else.

At sunset, the low sun lights Rainier's west and north faces, which are the faces Seattle sees. That is when you get alpenglow, the pink and orange wash on the glaciers that lasts a few minutes after the sun drops behind you. Then comes blue hour. In roughly the 30 to 40 minutes between sunset and the end of civil twilight, the sky behind Rainier deepens, the city lights come on, and the mountain stays visible as a pale shape. That window, not the sunset moment itself, is when most of the classic Kerry Park photographs are taken.

For the in-park version of this light, see our Mt. Rainier sunset guide, which covers Reflection Lakes and Sunrise. And if you want sunrise light on the mountain, the in-park spots in our Mt. Rainier sunrise guide are a much better bet than Queen Anne.

The Geometry of the Kerry Park View

The Space Needle is 0.8 miles from Kerry Park and Mt. Rainier is 60.6 miles away, so the Needle looks far bigger than a 14,411-foot volcano. The top of the Needle sits about 5.3° above eye level at the railing. Rainier's summit sits about 2.1° above it.

Here is what the terrain does to the view, from a line-of-sight calculation using elevation data along the 97-km path, with standard atmospheric refraction:

• About 7,000 feet of Rainier is visible. Everything below roughly 7,300 to 7,400 feet is hidden behind foothill ridges in front of the mountain, with about 650 m (2,100 ft) of Earth's curvature over the distance accounting for much of it. What you see is the glaciated upper half of the cone.
• The visible mountain is only about 1.25° tall. That is about two and a half full moons stacked up. To the eye it reads as big because it is bright and isolated, but in a phone's wide lens it shrinks to a small white triangle.
• The Needle is not in front of Rainier. It sits about 11° to the left (at 141°). Seattle's tallest building, Columbia Center, is almost exactly behind the Needle from the park (about 141.6°), which is why the two seem to stack in many photos.

That last point decides your lens. To fit both the Needle and the mountain with some breathing room, you need a horizontal field of view of around 17 to 20°, which is roughly a 100 to 120 mm lens on a full-frame camera, or a phone's 5x telephoto (a 3x lens works with a little cropping). A wide-angle lens gives you the whole skyline and Elliott Bay, but Rainier becomes a smudge on the horizon. For the mountain alone above the downtown towers, 300 mm or longer.

The steel sculpture in the park, Doris Chase's Changing Form (1971), is the other compositional tool. Photographers use its openings to frame the Needle or the mountain. On a busy evening it is also the easiest meeting point in the park.

This is also why distance matters for visibility. Sixty miles is a lot of air. On a hazy summer afternoon, or during wildfire smoke season in August and September, the mountain can be technically "out" (no cloud in the way) but washed to near invisibility. Our post on how far Mt. Rainier is from Seattle covers the drive if you want to close that gap. For more on the mountain's size, see the Mt. Rainier height guide.

Getting to Kerry Park: Parking, Transit and Crowds

Kerry Park is about a 10- to 15-minute drive from downtown Seattle or a 20- to 25-minute walk from Seattle Center, the last stretch steeply uphill. Parking is free street parking on W Highland Drive and the residential blocks around it, and it fills fast on any clear evening.

A few practical points:

• By car: Plan to circle. On a clear summer evening the blocks nearest the railing can fill well before sunset. The streets north of Highland are residential, so read the posted signs.
• By bus: Queen Anne Ave N, two blocks east of the park, is the hill's main bus corridor. Routes change, so check King County Metro's trip planner for the stop nearest W Highland Drive.
• On foot from Seattle Center: Walk north up Queen Anne Ave N or 3rd Ave W, then west on Highland. It is a real climb. Coming back down is the easy part.
• Crowds: The railing is short and the terrace is small. On clear July and August evenings it is shoulder to shoulder at sunset. Tripods are fine but take up space; a compact one that sits on the wall is the polite option.
• Time on site: 20 minutes covers the view. An hour covers sunset through blue hour, which is what you came for.

If Kerry Park is packed, two quieter options are close by. The Betty Bowen memorial viewpoint in Marshall Park, at 7th Ave W and W Highland, a few blocks west, faces the other way: out over Puget Sound, a sunset view rather than a Rainier view. For other places in the city with Rainier in the frame, from Jefferson Park to Seward Park, see our guide to seeing Mt. Rainier from Seattle.

Is Kerry Park Safe?

During its posted hours, Kerry Park is a busy tourist viewpoint, and the usual city precautions apply: keep bags with you and leave nothing visible in your car. After closing is different. Around 3:30 AM on Saturday, October 10, 2026, two men were shot during a large late-night street party at the park, and police recovered about 50 rifle and handgun shell casings (MyNorthwest). A juvenile was arrested. City Councilmember Bob Kettle has since called for coordinated action at the park by police, parks and transportation departments.

The practical takeaway is simple. Come for sunset and blue hour, leave by the 10 PM closing time, and do not leave anything visible in your car.

A Short History of Kerry Park

Kerry Park became a city park in 1927, when Albert Sperry Kerry and his wife gave the viewpoint to Seattle; the family contributed $20,000 toward its purchase, according to the Queen Anne Historical Society. The lower park is older: George Kinnear donated it in 1904 to be "a park forever," and it appears on the Olmsted Brothers' 1908 parks map (Friends of Seattle's Olmsted Parks). In 1971 the Kerrys' children gave Changing Form to the city.

The view itself had to be defended. In the 1970s, the United South Slope Residents fought high-rise development on the hill, gathering 4,800 petition signatures and winning a court case that made state environmental reviews weigh the cumulative impacts of projects.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you see Mt. Rainier from Kerry Park?

Yes, on clear days. Rainier rises behind the downtown skyline, about 11° to the right of the Space Needle. Based on ten years of modeled cloud data, it is likely visible in the hour before sunset on about 28% of evenings a year, from 66% in July down to 11 to 13% in December and February.

What time is best to visit Kerry Park?

Arrive 30 to 45 minutes before sunset and stay about 30 minutes after it. The evening sun lights the skyline and the mountain from the front, and blue hour adds city lights. Sunrise puts the sun in your eyes for most of the year.

Can you watch the New Year's Eve fireworks from Kerry Park?

Yes, the park looks straight at the Space Needle, so its fireworks show is in full view, and the terrace fills up early. Expect parking nearby to be scarce and consider walking up from lower Queen Anne. Seattle in late December is also usually cloudy or foggy, which can soften the view.

Before You Head Up the Hill

The single most useful thing you can do is check whether Rainier is out before you go. A Kerry Park visit without the mountain is still a fine skyline view. With it, it is the picture on half the postcards in Seattle. Our live Mt. Rainier visibility forecast scores the conditions every 15 minutes and shows a 10-day outlook, and the Rainier webcams let you see the mountain's side of the sky directly. If the score looks good at 4 PM in summer, start walking up.