Flooding's toll on national parks and forests: $50M

Fixing all the forest roads and trails that lace Washington's flood-hammered mountains could cost more than $50 million, and the extensive damage will keep people from many favorite destination spots well into the summer, if not longer.

As the rivers recede and people head into the woods to tally the destruction, the toll of this month's flooding is sobering.

Mount Rainier National Park alone suffered about $30 million in damage, a level unseen in the 107 years since its creation. Visitors will be lucky if they can get into the park at all by Christmas. And it will take longer to clear a path to the winter destination spot at Paradise.

"This isn't going to happen overnight," Congressman Norm Dicks, D-Bremerton, said Tuesday after a tour with park officials.

National forests in Washington and Oregon also face extensive repairs, particularly the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, which includes Mount St. Helens, and the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, in Seattle's backyard. The North Cascades National Park and Olympic National Park also saw roads washed away.

Hikers can't get to the most heavily used trail on the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie, the route to ice caves near Verlot on the Mountain Loop Highway. Floods damaged a bridge spanning a river there, said Gary Paull, wilderness and trail coordinator for the forest.

Parts of the Pacific Crest Trail, which traverses Washington, were supposed to be repaired in 2007 for flood damage suffered in 2003. Now Paull wonders whether there is more to fix.

"It comes at a bad time because trails funding for national parks and national forests is declining," said Andrew Engelson of the Washington Trails Association, a group representing hikers. "Now the storms have hit us pretty hard and that's going to set the work back even further,"

Dicks, who is expected to chair the congressional committee responsible for spending in national parks and national forests when his party takes control in January, said securing money to repair Mount Rainier will be his first priority.

"As the new chairman, I'm going to be in a good position to see that it does get done," he said.

Road-repair money could be the easiest to find for the parks and the national forests. The Federal Highway Administration often pays to fix forest roads damaged in floods. But money for trails and campgrounds could be more scarce because that spending is usually part of annual budgets that take months to hammer out.

The National Park Service doesn't have enough money to pay for all the repairs right now, said Mount Rainier Superintendent Dave Uberuaga. It will have to turn to the highway administration and Congress for help.

Meanwhile, Uberuaga said he is pushing to reopen the park at least at the Nisqually entrance as far as Longmire, where the National Park Inn and many park offices are. The Nisqually River washed away chunks of the road leading there and severed sewer, water and power lines.

In a "best scenario," the gate to Longmire will open by Christmas, he predicted.

As for Paradise, Uberuaga was unwilling to say it will be closed for the entire winter.

"All of my gateway communities would hope I wouldn't say that," he said.

Those communities are where locals operating restaurants and hotels have watched business dwindle as the gates remain closed. This is the slow season, but Christmastime usually brings a surge of tourists to the area around Ashford, near the Nisqually entrance.

That's where Angie Mackey showed up for work Sunday at the Copper Creek Inn, ready to serve slices of the famous blackberry pie that usually draws the tourists in droves.

For six hours she waited. And waited. Not a single customer came.

"The only people we've had in here is a few locals," Mackey said.

"Other than that, it's people that don't know the park is closed. And that's not many."

Warren Cornwall: 206-464-2311 or wcornwall@seattletimes.com