The brick-oven bread and Swiss pastries disappear in 30 minutes from the shelves at Eatonville's Ohop Valley Bakery after Mount Rainier tour buses unload outside. Tourists who don't speak English just point, smile and pile money on the counter.

"It can be like a tornado coming through," bakery owner Charlie Butler said. "Tour buses are a blessing and a curse to us because they show up with very little warning."

That's in the summertime. Butler's bakery makes twice in August what it brings in in January.

In Eatonville, Greenwater, Ashford and Elbe, tourist business is seasonal, weather-dependent and unpredictable. Mount Rainier attracts visitors in summer and whenever the weather is nice. Winter rain keeps people away. Snow lures few other than skiers.

That capricious nature of mountain tourism is a critical part of the tricky business equation that confronts all who try to make a living in the gateway communities surrounding Mount Rainier.

Entrepreneurs and artisans who hope to profit must be shrewd and adaptable. They either depend on summer business to carry them through, expand to markets beyond the mountain or shore up their income with other earnings, they say.

Though the mountain's overall economic impact on the Puget Sound region has been estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars, nobody has studied its precise effect on the small businesses that surround the park.

The area's economic indicators lag far behind county and statewide averages.

In 1996, per capita personal income was $14,773 in the Upper Nisqually River Valley, compared with $21,728 for all of Pierce County and $22,546 for Washington state, according to a 1997 economic analysis that the county conducted for a proposed new land-use plan.

Unemployment in the area - the Ashford, Elbe and Alder communities - was 9.1 percent; countywide it was 6.2 percent.

Upper Nisqually retail sales declined 12.5 percent from 1987 to 1996, state Department of Revenue figures show. Over the same period, they grew more than 33 percent statewide and 29 percent in Pierce County.

It is tough for retail businesses that depend on locals, said Rick Adams, president of the 55-member Mount Rainier Business Association in Ashford and Elbe. His family has run various businesses in Elbe since 1968.

He said residents frequently shop outside the area, where prices are lower. His Elbe Mall can't compete with the hardware and auto parts stores in larger towns.

Of the mountain-area businesses that cater to tourists, most are devoted to lodging. Small motels, cabins and bed-and-breakfast establishments dot the highway outside the Nisqually entrance. Likewise in the Crystal Mountain area.

Rainier's nine-month off-season is hard on restaurants. Unpredictable, late-night crowds in summer often mean long runs of 12-hour days. But when summer is over, most in Ashford and Elbe either shut down or open only on weekends.

"If the people aren't here, it doesn't matter if you're open or what you're doing," said Kathryn Simonson, who owns Rainier Overland Restaurant & Lodge near Ashford. "I barely scrape through the winter."

Bob and Sandy Nalley depend on summer rentals at their Stone Creek Lodge to carry them through the year.

"If we don't make it in the summer, we don't make it," Bob said. "You have to have a strong sense of budget and great faith that summer will come."

The Nalleys were college professors in northern Maine before they bought and renamed the old Mount Rainier Country Cabins in 1997. They are Oregon natives who wanted a career change. Sandy, 54, taught psychology. Bob, 57, taught computer science education.

"It was time to do nice things for people and have them want and appreciate it," Sandy said.

Their tiny, one-bedroom home is attached to the lodge office. While Sandy drinks her morning coffee, she likes to look out the kitchen window and watch deer nibble at new shoots. It sounds relaxing. But summers are hectic. The Nalleys rarely take time off and almost never leave the lodge together.

To make a living, they say, they must gross an average of $5,000 each month. In the winter, they rarely rent a cabin on a weekday, while in summer, vacancies are rare. Last August, for example, they took in more than $20,000. But in April, gross sales amounted to only $2,000.

The cycle is felt beyond the food and lodging trade, too.

"It is a short season. You've really got to hustle. You've got to figure it out," said Bob Grubb, who with his wife, Debbie, runs Wapiti Woolies, the Greenwater hat outlet that is itself a tour bus magnet. "We do a lot of mail order. You can't do it all by traffic in Greenwater."

Grubb, 51, has been in business for 25 years. An avid skier, he wanted to be close to the slopes. Now the Grubbs design and manufacture thousands of wool hats and headbands every year.

Wapiti Woolies markets through an Internet Web page. It also sells hats to REI and to Lou Whittaker's climbing guide service, Rainier Mountaineering Inc.

Some businesses evolve without a plan. Peggy Johnson, 50, paints wooden sculptures on her kitchen table. Six years ago, she and her husband, Gary, 52, moved into a trailer along the railroad tracks east of Elbe. Gary, a disabled veteran, ran a portable sawmill, but didn't make much money at it.

In 1997, he cranked up his chain saw and became an artist.

"I watched another guy carve ugly bears for two days and says, 'I can do better than that,'" he recalled. "Show me a picture and I can do it. I have no fear no more."

It might take a half-day or more to carve a 6-foot bear. They sell for between $600 and $1,000 apiece, Gary said. But they begin as simple logs. It's a barter-dependent business.

"I trade bears for logs, and we go from there," Gary said. "I traded an eagle off for a vacuum cleaner when we needed a vacuum cleaner."

Chain-saw wildlife crowds the Johnsons' yard. Bears on all fours, bears upright, bear families, a totem pole, eagles, buffalo, deer, elk. Gary carves the basic outlines; Peggy adds details. She and daughter Co, 26, paint. The business is called Knotty Woods Kountry Art.

"We've got our creatures in every country, every state," Gary boasted. He cultivates his backwoods looks with a full beard, long hair, slouch hat and lots of sawdust. "The whole world comes through here."

The Ashford and Elbe areas have always attracted artists who hoped to benefit from tourist traffic. Few stay more than a couple of years. An exception is Jana Gardiner, who with her husband, Rick Johnson, runs Ashford Creek Pottery. She throws the pots, he decorates them. Their pottery features mountain imagery, trees and flowers and other designs that call the Pacific Northwest to mind.

Gardiner, 39, studied her craft in California and came to Ashford in 1980.

"The first summer I wound up glazing everything with Mount St. Helens ash," she said.

They have a contract with Rainier concessionaire Guest Services Inc. to sell their pottery in the national park gift shops. It is the couple's largest wholesale contract and brings in about $10,000 a year, Gardiner said. Rainier tourists account for about 75 percent of their sales, and business is growing.

"Production is probably our biggest problem," Gardiner said. "It's not marketing."

Tourist-based businesses change hands regularly.

Kenny So and his family bought the Gateway Inn, just outside the park, about 10 years ago. Son John said the Sos knew it was a seasonal business, but "we didn't know it was going to be this dramatic."

The Sos were the first Koreans to buy into the Upper Nisqually Valley, where most residents are white. Since then, two other Korean families have acquired nearby businesses.

Honam and Sunae Song bought the Ashford Valley Grocery, a filling station and convenience store, about four years ago. Honam, 44, who once worked as an importer in Chile, said he considered 100 different Western Washington businesses before settling in Ashford with his wife and two children. Of all the opportunities he considered, "this place is the best," he said. "In summertime, many people visit."

Many of the folks trying to make a living along the way to Rainier say they were less interested in making a fortune than in crafting a better lifestyle. Simonson at the Rainier Overland Restaurant & Lodge moved to Ashford years ago because she wanted a nice place to raise her two children, who were preschoolers at the time and are now teenagers.

The Butlers in Eatonville opened their bakery a few years after moving north from California. Charlie, 44, is an airline pilot; his wife, Lynn, 43, is a nurse anesthetist.

"We wanted to have fun and help the community," Charlie said. "The thought of making a lot of money was never part of the equation."

But sales have increased, so he's optimistic.

"Most people up here have a second income," said Tanna Osterhaus., a former president of the Mount Rainier Business Association. She and her husband, Luke, run Jasmer's, a combination bed-and-breakfast and property management business in Ashford. Luke moved to Ashford in 1976 to get away from the city.

"This isn't a place where you can make a million bucks, but where you can make a healthy living if you're willing to work at it," he said. "Up here, you're limited in what you can do, who you can do it for and what season you can do it in." (Published 1999)