This summer won't be the same at Rainier

If you're still disappointed about not being able to go on your annual sledding trip to Mount Rainier this winter, but have big plans for summer in your favorite national park, get used to disappointment.

For Rainier lovers, this may be far from a typical summer.

Mostly closed to the public since an unprecedented rainstorm inflicted $36 million in damage to roads and other facilities in November, Mount Rainier National Park is rebounding, but officials say repairs will be far from complete in time for the usual summer throngs.

Access to Paradise, the park's most popular destination, should reopen in April or May. But some major highways won't be fixed until August or later. The Wonderland Trail and other popular hiking routes sustained serious damage; the full extent won't be known until snow melts. Issuing of backcountry hiking permits for this summer is on hold.

And for future generations, this may be a sign of things to come in a park that sees as many as 2 million visitors a year. River bottoms have been filling with sediment and rising, leaving less room to keep future floods from leaving riverbanks and overwhelming nearby roads and facilities.

Rampaging debris flows

For park maintenance chief Lucy Gonyea, the Nov. 6 storm's magnitude struck home the next morning when she arrived at Sunshine Point, just inside the park's Nisqually gate. Things looked strangely different.

Where just the day before she saw a dark, cloistered forest of tall trees, she now saw a lot of light and no trees at all.

"That whole land mass was gone," Gonyea said. "It was a shock."

Rains had pushed the Nisqually River to a record height, wiping out the point and wreaking a range of destruction throughout the park.

The record 18 inches of rain that fell in the 36 hours over Nov. 6 and 7 filled the park's rivers with almost 100 times their usual volumes. Paul Kennard, the geomorphologist for the park, said the rains also combined with the sediment from retreating glaciers to create at least three debris flows. Debris flows are the most destructive form of landslides, and they're so thick they float rocks.

The Nisqually River tore through the Sunshine Point campground that Gonyea visited Nov. 7. It and other rivers weakened and damaged roads throughout the park. Park officials hope repairs can be made in time to get Highway 706 open to Longmire and possibly Paradise by early April, but the repairs could stretch into mid-May.

As it is, repairs have gone at lightning speed compared to the usual drill of commissioning designs, surveying, engineering, gathering bids and putting out construction contracts. On the very week of the floods, road crews — park employees with heavy equipment — started working without designs and brought in jetty rocks to shore up weakened road embankments. By the time repairs are done, they will have used nearly 30,000 tons of rock, equal to more than half the weight of Seattle's Smith Tower. Some rocks were so large, at 15 tons apiece, that only one could fit on a truck trailer at a time.

Trail bridges gone

Snow has prevented a complete assessment of the hiking trails, but early scouting suggests the damage from both flooding and high December winds is extensive. On the Wonderland Trail, the 93-mile trail that circumnavigates the park, at least 10 bridges are out and several others are expected to be missing, said Lauren Braden, communications director for the Washington Trails Association.

Hikers will probably be rerouted around a section of the Wonderland Trail by the Carbon River and will have to walk four miles on the Stevens Canyon Road near Martha Falls.

"It's safe to say that it won't be possible to do the Wonderland Trail in the classic sense of doing the trail this summer," said Lee Taylor, information officer for the park.

To better assess trail conditions, the park will also wait until June before taking backcountry reservations for the Wonderland Trail, Taylor said. The park usually begins issuing permits in mid-March.

This round of flooding also raises concerns about flooding in the future. The retreating Van Trump glacier above Longmire has produced four debris flows in the past five years, Kennard said, and just one of those raised the bed of the Nisqually River six feet. Not counting the recent flooding, the river has risen 38 feet since 1910. Now Longmire sits 15 feet below the river level.

"It's sort of almost a New Orleans situation," Kennard said. "The river keeps getting higher and Longmire isn't getting any higher."