A night at the inn, at ravaged Rainier

LONGMIRE, Pierce County — For another month or so — maybe longer — Washington state will be home to one of the most exclusive hotels in the world, the 25-room National Park Inn. With most of the rest of Mount Rainier National Park closed due to storm damage, and the Paradise Inn closed for remodeling, this is the only place for a traveler to sleep and enjoy indoor plumbing in the park's largely unpeopled wilderness.

It's just you, a few dozen other visitors and 250,000 pristine acres, and you don't have to sleep in your Capilene.

You'll also have no phones, cell or otherwise, no TV, and no Internet, which combined with so much wilderness can make for a strange sensation. The rumble of an automobile engine becomes a rare event as the park roads are only seeing workers and trucks carrying rock to fill and shore up roadways and embankments ripped out by an epic deluge in early November.

The result is a deeply relaxing pattern of pleasant meals in a nearly empty, full-service restaurant, lounging by a river-rock fireplace and the occasional hike through that aged scotch of Northwest nature, old-growth forest. The hotel staff is easygoing and accommodating in most any regard, tending the fire, setting out afternoon tea and scones, and arranging at one point to have a 14,411-foot mountain appear outside the window.

In a typical year, roads in this part of the park would be busy with people headed here or up the road to Paradise for weekends of skiing, sledding, snowshoeing or the occasional winter summit. But the Paradise Inn is closed for renovations until next year, leaving the National Park Inn as the only active hotel in the park.

Updates on the Web

Track Mount Rainier National Park repairs: www.nps.gov/mora/parknews/november-2006-flooding.htm

The floods shut down roads in the rest of the park, with 18 inches of rain falling Nov. 6 and 7. There was little snow to absorb it, so the rain throttled down the park's streams and rivers in torrents never before seen in the park's history. Massive trees were peeled from banks and turned into battering rams; boulders exposed by receding glaciers were dislodged and even floated by the slurry of glacial silt in powerful debris flows.

"All the monitoring stations all around the mountain all set records," said Kevin Bacher, a park public information officer and interpretive ranger who gave a regularly-scheduled presentation on the flooding during our visit.

By the time the waters receded, every major road in the park was damaged. Officials, many of them now working out of temporary facilities, had to close the park.

A few hikers still walk in from the park entrances, but the usual traffic of winter visitors has been shut down. The lone exception was made for guests of the National Park Inn, who get shuttled in on back roads from outside the Nisqually entrance while repairs are made to the main road. The result is a unique chance to have one of the Northwest's great treasures nearly to one's self, without the clamor of cars and the crush of fellow tourists.

Dare we say it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience, like going with the Washington State University Cougars to the Rose Bowl, only less expensive, more peaceful, a lot less crowded and with a better outcome.

Disconnecting

National Park Inn

The inn is open to guests Friday and Saturday nights only while major repairs continue to Highway 706 between Ashford and Longmire. Full operations resume when that stretch of highway reopens. Best-case projections put that in early April, though fickle weather could delay repairs into mid-May. Meanwhile, guests are shuttled by van on back roads from Ashford.

The inn, which features a full-service dining room and a guest lounge, charges $100 for a room without bath, $134 for a room with bath and $185 for a two-room unit with bath. Snowshoes and cross-country skis are available for rent. Souvenirs, snacks and other amenities are available at the nearby general store.

More information

360-569-2275 or http://rainier.guestservices.com

Other access

From the park's Carbon River entrance, take a 4-mile hike to see flood damage.

On Sundays only, 8 a.m.-5 p.m., visitors may walk or bicycle into the park from Nisqually Gate as far as Westside Road, and on Westside Road as far as Dry Creek.

At 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, rangers lead interpretive walks from Nisqually Gate to Sunshine Point to see storm damage. Parking space at Nisqually Gate is extremely limited.No entrance fee will be charged until the road reopens to Longmire.

It's obvious from the start that this is a different kind of outing. A mile from the shuttle parking lot outside the park, the van crosses the Nisqually River and guests can see just how powerful the floods were. The riverbed looks like a Mount St. Helens blowdown, with hundred-foot-long trees, shorn of their branches, stranded on new boulder beaches 100 yards across. Freshly scoured banks rise 10, 20 and in some cases 60 feet above the river.

The sense of seclusion builds almost immediately as the van leaves pavement and winds along a single-lane forest road.

"I'm starting to hear banjos about now," said one guest as the driver, Don Hay, stepped out to open a gate.

Approaching Longmire, Hay pointed out the shoulders of the mountain across the river.

"Before the flood, you wouldn't have that view," he said. "All this was trees."

My room was sparely equipped with bark-on furniture, sweet-smelling soaps and no TV or phone. Fittingly, my cellphone said, "Auto Update of Time & Date Not Available." I checked for a wireless Internet connection, just to see. OK, I really wanted one. But the height of technology was a four-cup Mr. Coffee, which I promptly used to mix up an envelope of hot cocoa and plot my behavior in this scaled down, disconnected, low-tech, early-20th-century cul-de-sac.

I fought the urge to somehow connect with the outer world. It was a Friday afternoon, the weekly national holiday of Seattle. No one needed me. My wife fully knew what I was up to. My daughter, a teenager, wouldn't much care. My dog doesn't answer the phone.

I went with the force. I took a nap.

Rainier so near

That evening, the dining room was nearly empty. I had a sumptuous two-inch plank of meatloaf and drove it home with blackberry cobbler á la mode. At breakfast, my waitress was filling my coffee cup as if she had ESP. Photographer Greg Gilbert and I were two of a handful of diners.

National Park Inn

The mountain was out. In Seattle, that means a pleasant day with occasional glimpses of the peak between lane changes. Here it's like having a temperamental 14,411-foot pet following at your heels. It's everywhere. Look out the window when you wake up and it's a study in light and shadow, with wisps of snow curling off the top. Cross the suspension bridge on the Nisqually, and it's just over your shoulder, sporting a sombrero and cape of cloud.

Staffers lead regular snowshoe trips around the lodge, but we set off on our own after stumbling on to the Eagle Peak Trail. The park forest is designated wilderness just a few hundred yards from the roadways and it was soon obvious. Huge cedars loomed all around, and the forest floor was a thick carpet of moss and salal thriving on the downed and rotting remains of a former canopy brought to its knees. Every sound was basic: a polysyllabic wren, a growling raven, the white noise of the river.

It seemed so incongruous. Much of America's wilderness ethic is built around a hardy, frontier spirit in which you pay in risk and sweat to see the forest primeval, sleeping on the ground, donning wool and hiking vast distances. Here you can roll out of bed and stroll through the old growth, in cotton socks and sturdy shoes. Or you can wait until you're good and ready. Did I say the cobbler is available for breakfast?

"Not just anyone can make it at Longmire — you've got to be tough," joked Mic Fite of Kirkland, who visited with his wife, Jan, and did a mix of reading and snowshoeing.

Bob and Donna Raforth played cribbage by night in front of the lodge's massive fireplace and by day set out on the Wonderland Trail, the 93-mile superhighway for the lugged-sole set that circumnavigates the mountain. They went up Rampart Ridge. Bob did the hike in blue jeans.

"We saw Mount Rainier in all its glory," he said later. "It's an unobstructed view from up there. Well worth the hike."

For the most part, they had the mountain all to themselves.

Eric Sorensen, a former Seattle Times reporter, is Northwest Weekend's boating columnist and senior editor of Conservation Magazine. He lives in Kenmore. Contact him: svwhim@yahoo.com.