21 & Over | Drumheller Fountain and Rainier Vista — The mountain at the end of the lawn

Walk south from Red Square and the campus opens without warning. A circular pool throws a plume of water into the air, and behind it the ground falls away down a long green corridor that ends, on a clear day, in Mount Rainier.

This is Drumheller Fountain, dug as Geyser Basin for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909, and the corridor is Rainier Vista, an axis the Olmsted Brothers aimed straight at the mountain when they laid out the fairgrounds that became this campus. Students call the pool Frosh Pond, because throwing first-year students into it used to be a tradition and occasionally still is.

A comedy about three friends and one very bad night does not need a view like this, which is precisely why it works when the film uses it. The vista puts the whole misadventure inside a place that is beautiful and indifferent, the way a real university is. The characters have a crisis. The mountain is still there.

Come on a rare cloudless morning and stand at the north rim of the fountain looking south. Rainier is fourteen thousand feet high and about ninety kilometres away, and from here it sits at the end of a lawn like a piece of set dressing that got out of hand. Most days it is hidden entirely. Locals will tell you that when it is out, you say so out loud.