Initial zeal for profits has yielded to crush of visitors today

Other places, the bears might have been seen as a problem. But not at Mount Rainier.

There, the bears were seen as a way to make money.

Bears were frequent visitors to Mount Rainier National Park's Paradise Valley in the 1920s and '30s - back when the Paradise Inn dumped its kitchen garbage into open trenches. Every night around dinner time, 15 or 20 hungry black bears would meander down and root around in the steak bones and cantaloupe rinds.

Paul Sceva, the Tacoma promoter who ran the park concessions at the time, knew a tourist attraction when he saw one. He found a passenger bus and advertised "Bear Pit Tours." For $1, tourists got a ride from the inn to the garbage pits, a chance to watch the bears scavenge in the trash and a ride back.

Sceva even offered a guarantee: "No bear, no fare."

The garbage tours were a blip in the history of Mount Rainier National Park. But the speculative zeal that inspired them was enormously important.

For most of Rainier's history, civic boosters, businessmen and political leaders in Western Washington chased every opportunity to make money from the park. They tried to cut its trees, harness water from its glaciers and mine its minerals.

But more than anything, they tried to entice tourists, constantly pushing for more roads, more restaurants, ski lifts, tramways, hotels. They promoted activities that would persuade more people to stay in the park longer and spend more money.

The most grandiose ideas never came to pass. But it wasn't for lack of trying, and the constant pressure had a powerful effect on the park's development.

Time after time, local entrepreneurs forced park managers to put commerce before conservation. The pursuit of tourism dictated the location and design of park facilities. It exacerbated crowding problems. And it ate up a disproportionate share of park budgets.

"The nearby cities of Seattle and Tacoma profoundly influenced the development of Mount Rainier National Park,'' Theodore Catton writes in "Wonderland,'' his history of Rainier.

Park managers spent so much time and money dealing with tourism issues, Catton says, that there was little left for protecting plants and animals.

Today, the dynamics have changed. The park's battle is no longer with local businessmen and their blueprints, but with local visitors who swarm to the mountain in ever growing numbers.

This year, the park service and the communities that surround Rainier are co-sponsoring the park's 100th anniversary celebration. The event is intended to commemorate a century of cooperation and good relations. The theme is "100 Years of Resource Stewardship."

But the fact is, for most of the century, the relationship between the park and the communities around it has been anything but cooperative. They had different priorities and clashed repeatedly over their visions of what a national park should be.

Mount Rainier wasn't the only national park to be pressured by entrepreneurs. But because the mountain is so close to urban areas, commercial pressure here was greater than in more remote parks such as Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon.

Mount Rainier bursts abruptly from the back yards of Seattle and Tacoma, hanging just of out of reach, like a big, frosted confection. Unlike other large parks, Rainier is visited mostly by people who live within an easy day's drive. That has meant a powerful hometown constituency, particularly in Pierce County, in whose borders most of the park lies.

Pierce County's playground

Over the past century, Pierce County residents have tended to regard the park as their personal playground - and marketable commodity. To promote their views, they never hesitated to call members of Congress, write letters to editors and, when they thought it necessary, slam their fists on the park superintendent's desk.

Businessmen had been looking at Mount Rainier with dollar signs in their eyes well before the park was created. As early as 1880, a Tacoma company proposed supplying the city's refrigeration needs by sliding blocks of ice down a 60-mile chute from the Nisqually Glacier.

Three years later, Yelm pioneer James Longmire discovered warm mineral springs at the base of the mountain, and the tourist rush was on.

"Well, boys, I found my fortune," Longmire told his sons when he returned to the family farm at Yelm. The Longmires started clearing trails and building cabins and bathhouses.

The Longmires' tourism enterprise grew helter-skelter, eventually including a two-story hotel, stables, an ice cream parlor, a barber shop, a photo studio and a pool hall, all spread over 18 acres in the area now known as Longmire near the Nisqually entrance.

'Anything to make money'

John Muir, the naturalist and wilderness advocate, met Longmire on a climb to the top of the mountain in 1888. He later described Rainier's first concessionaire as "a tall, lanky moneymaker.''

"He will do anything to make money," Muir said.

The commercial excesses of the Longmires helped convince many Northwesterners that some sort of federal protection was necessary for Mount Rainier.

Rising nearly 3 miles above Puget Sound like an ethereal island in the sky, Mount Rainier seemed almost a holy place to many visitors. The contrast between Rainier's lush fields of wildflowers and pure white snow and the Longmires' resort, fronted with advertisements hung on a wire fence, seemed to many incongruous and disrespectful.

Without federal regulation, they feared, commercial interests would destroy the magic of the mountain.

Railroad proposes a park

The idea to make Mount Rainier a national park was first broached by the Northern Pacific Railroad. The railroad owned about half the land now inside the park boundaries, thanks to a federal land grant that gave it alternating sections of land on a 40-mile-wide swath along its right of way. In 1883, the year it completed its transcontinental line to Tacoma, the railroad began discreetly lobbying to turn the mountain into a national park.

The railroad had three main motives. First, it wanted to fill its trains with tourists, as it was doing at Yellowstone National Park, which it had also helped create. Second, railroad directors had significant land holdings in Tacoma, which they wanted to develop as the gateway to the park.

And third, the railroad was interested in striking a land trade with the federal government whereby it would swap the high, treeless slopes of Rainier for profitable timberland elsewhere in the West.

In 1883, the railroad set up an all-expenses-paid junket to Rainier for a prominent party that included U.S. Sen. George Edmunds of Vermont; Karl von Zittel, a German geologist; and James Bryce, a British writer and member of Parliament. They made the first leg of the trip on the Northern Pacific's new line. A company geologist, Bailey Willis, then led the party on a pack trip to the luxuriant alpine meadow now known as Spray Park, on the mountain's northwest slope.

As railroad executives had hoped, all wrote enthusiastic and influential reviews of the trip. "We have seen nothing more beautiful in Switzerland or Tyrol, in Norway or in the Pyrenees, than the Carbon River glaciers and the great Puyallup glaciers," von Zittel and Bryce wrote.

'An arctic island'

"We may perhaps be permitted to express a hope that the suggestion will at no distant date be made to Congress that Mount Rainier should, like Yosemite Valley and the geyser region of the Upper Yellowstone, be reserved by the Federal Government and treated as a national park."

In a memorial to Congress the following year, Willis described Rainier as "an arctic island in a temperate zone."

"On the great peak the glaciers linger still,'' Willis wrote. "They give to it its greatest beauty. They are themselves magnificent, and with them survives a colony of arctic animals and plants which cannot exist in the temperate climate of the less lofty mountains. These arctic forms are as effectually isolated as shipwrecked sailors on an island in mid-ocean. There is no refuge for them beyond their haunts on ice-bound cliffs.

"But even there the birds and animals are no longer safe from the keen sportsman, and the few survivors must soon be exterminated unless protected by the Government in a national park."

Also supporting the idea of a national park were scientific and preservationist groups, including the Geological Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Geographic Society and the Sierra Club. Climbing groups were enthusiastic supporters, as were University of Washington faculty members and local chambers of commerce.

Slowly, the wheels began turning in Washington, D.C. But there were problems. While the railroad did its best to remain behind the scenes, suspicions of a land grab slowed the proposal in Congress.

Also, lumber, mining and grazing interests in the state resisted, arguing that a federal reserve at Rainier would lock up valuable land and waste natural resources. Momentum builds

Years of negotiations and political maneuvering followed, during which park borders were drawn and redrawn to exclude some 300 square miles that had potential mining and timber value. The railroad was quietly paid off with public timber land elsewhere in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. Cattle and sheep ranching interests were mollified by leaving the eastern slopes of the Cascades out of the park.

Entrepreneurs in Tacoma and Seattle who sniffed the economic possibilities became valuable allies of preservationists.

Tacoma business interests wholeheartedly threw their weight behind the park campaign, assuming that having an international attraction in their back yard would bring civic status. They believed it would mean a steady stream of tourists and federal appropriations, creating jobs, money and prosperity.

Tacoma boosters stalled the campaign, however, by insisting that the mountain - christened Rainier in 1792 by explorer George Vancouver after a fellow British naval officer - be renamed Mount Tacoma, and the park called Mount Tacoma National Park. They hoped to attract business to Tacoma, which by then had been outdistanced by Seattle in the race for economic dominance of Puget Sound.

It wasn't until 1899, a full 16 years after the idea was first proposed, that President William McKinley signed the legislation that created Mount Rainier National Park.

In the early years of the 20th century, the alliance between preservationists and tourism developers was an easy one. Few foresaw the conflict that would eventually arise. Preservation and public use were not seen as conflicting interests, but ones that could peacefully coexist.

The park legislation reflected that sense of harmony. The purpose of the new park, the law said, was not only to preserve, but also "to provide for public enjoyment."

Along with language about preserving "from injury or destruction the scenic and other natural beauties of Mount Rainier," the congressional committee that recommended the park in 1888 added, "Construction of necessary tramways or railroads, hotel accommodations, etc., is proposed, so that this park may be preserved as a pleasure ground for tourists and health seekers."

Preservation and tourism

The issue that gradually arose to divide the two interests was one of degree: At what point does providing access and amenities for tourists infringe too much on aesthetics and the environment?

Soon after Rainier became a park, local interests began applying pressure to build roads. "Good roads" groups and automobile clubs from Tacoma and Seattle lobbied officials to open the park to automobiles - a step no other national park had taken. Up to then, visitors walked or rode on horseback or in horse-drawn wagons.

Mount Rainier's first manager, Grenville Allen, reluctantly agreed to let cars through the Nisqually gate on a trial basis in 1907, even though he said he personally thought the machines were dangerous and "a great annoyance."

Within months, local business groups had drawn up plans for a system of highways throughout the park. Proposals included a road completely around the mountain with stops at each of the glaciers. Another ran all the way to the summit. The crater basins near the top of the mountain, developers suggested, would be ideal for parking lots and perhaps a hotel.

When federal appropriations failed to materialize in desired amounts, Seattle and Tacoma chambers of commerce and Rotary clubs put together the Seattle-Tacoma Rainier National Park Advisory Board, which in 1912 unabashedly dedicated itself to the "development and exploitation of Mount Rainier National Park."

The board's first order of business was to hire a lobbyist to work for congressional appropriations for park roads. Next on its agenda was a tramway that was to start in the Paradise Valley, a mile above sea level, where today's visitors center stands, and climb 1,400 feet higher to a sweeping overlook at Panorama Point.

Congress at Paradise?

Commercial development had an enthusiastic supporter in U.S. Rep. Albert Johnson of Tacoma. He was so eager to see the mountain developed that he suggested in 1913 that the nation's capital be moved to Paradise in the summertime. Congress could escape the sweltering heat of the East Coast, Johnson said, and do its business in air "surrounded by glacial peaks of solid ice."

At first, the park service supported the idea of attracting more visitors. The concept that America's isolated Western parks could become too crowded seemed impossible.

But the park service's enthusiasm for tourism waned as the number of automobiles increased. In 1899, when McKinley signed the legislation creating the park, there were only 8,000 cars in the entire country. Ten years later there were 500,000. By 1920 there were 145,000 cars in Washington state alone, and on clear summer weekends it sometimes seemed that most of them were in the park.

Steven Mather, the first director of the park service and a millionaire who made his fortune with 20 Mule Team Borax, was initially a strong backer of park roads and commercial development. But the growing crowds at Rainier gave him second thoughts.

Mather visited Mount Rainier in 1919 and reported to the secretary of the Interior, "On Labor Day the largest crowds in the history of the park thronged its hotels and public automobile grounds.

"I had occasion to enter the park on two Sunday afternoons in August," Mather wrote, "and I was astounded to see the number of automobiles on their way out of the reservation. In less than 40 miles I passed over 400 machines."

Two years later, Mather's successor reported that on weekends and holidays, congestion was so bad that "60 percent of the people could not be comfortably accommodated."

But to those in pursuit of tourist dollars, crowding inside the park had a simple solution: more roads, more hotels, more parking lots.

In the spring of 1923, a big dump truck lumbered down Tacoma's Pacific Avenue, close on the heels of a marching band from Fort Lewis. The truck was heaped with snow, fresh from Mount Rainier. On top of the load, a group of young women shivering in bathing suits tossed snowballs at people on the sidewalks.

"Your National Park is Open Today!" said a sign on top of the truck.

The parade was one of dozens of marketing efforts to entice crowds to Mount Rainier by the Rainier National Park Co., a group of wealthy Tacoma and Seattle investors granted exclusive rights to operate park concessions.

Among its many promotional ideas, the Tacoma-based company hired Yakama Indians to dress in feathered headdresses and perform romanticized rituals for tourists.

The shows ended shortly after they began in 1925, and according to Cecelia Carpenter, a Tacoma historian who has written several books on Northwest tribes and their spiritual beliefs, it's not difficult to understand why. The attitudes of the two cultures toward the mountain could hardly have been more different.

To Indians, a place of spirits

Archaeological evidence indicates that indigenous tribes had been living in the area of the mountain since at least 3,000 B.C. - about the time cities were developing along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Southwest Asia. The native people had developed their own complex relationship with the mountain, and it had nothing to do with profit or pretense.

Natives who lived within sight of the mountain regarded it as a gathering place of powerful spirits, Carpenter said, and they treated it with the utmost respect. Indians did not worship the mountain, according to Carpenter, but they saw it as spectacular evidence of the power of Sagale Tyee, the highest of all spirit powers.

Other Rainier National Park Co. ideas had only slightly better success than the Indian shows. Promoters built a nine-hole golf course at Paradise, the location today of the Henry M. Jackson Visitor Center. They organized a motorcycle hill climb on the fragile valley's meadows. They sponsored ski races and built a toboggan run. And they imported an Eskimo sled driver and his huskies to give rides.

In its first five years of business, 1916-21, the Rainier National Park Co. spent more on the park than the federal government had spent there since the park was established.

By 1925, Congress had appropriated only $280,000 for roads. For the first 17 years of the park's existence, the government had not even put a permanent management structure in place. Until the National Park Service was created in 1916, a provisional "forestry service" watched over Rainier.

Private investors, on the other hand, reached deep into their own pockets. The centerpiece of their efforts was the 37-room Paradise Inn, which cost $91,000 and opened for business in 1917. In 1920 they added 104 rooms.

The push for roads

Until the mid-1920s, commercial interests in the park encountered little philosophical resistance. Federal funds were scarce, but support for development was high.

Initially, even the Sierra Club and the Seattle-based outdoors group The Mountaineers lobbied for more roads. In the debate over whether cars should be allowed into national parks, the Sierra Club sided with the car clubs, saying "we think the automobile adds a great zest to travel."

The Mountaineers - which gradually grew into an important anti-development voice - in the 1900s organized hiking parties that numbered in the hundreds. The idea that even appreciative people could damage the park by their sheer numbers was not yet given serious consideration.

Members of The Mountaineers pushed for roads that would open up the most remote areas of the park to hiking. At a 1925 meeting to pressure parks director Arno B. Cammerer, the renowned Mountaineer and founder of the Washington Alpine Club, Maj. Edward S. Ingraham, put in a plug for an airfield at Sunrise, a high sunny meadow on the mountain's northeastern side.

But attitudes soon started changing. As Washington state's tourism industry pushed for a loop road around the mountain and another circling the Paradise Valley, others began pushing equally hard in the opposite direction.

"With the roads come ever-increasing crowds, and the spirit of the wilderness is gone forever," Mountaineer George Vanderbilt Caesar wrote in The Saturday Evening Post in 1927. "It was never intended that (the national parks) should become glorified city parks, crowded to discomfort with jostling, jazzing hordes."

The greatest impediment to development at Rainier had been the mountain itself. Steep, unstable terrain made road-building difficult and expensive. Heavy snowfall restricted access to about three months in the summer, not enough to keep most tourist-oriented enterprises in the black.

Now the park service, criticized for years for dragging its feet on commercial development, came under attack for selling out to business interests. Increasingly, it found itself caught between two diverging visions of the park, and was forced to draw fine lines between what was appropriate in a national park and what was not.

Managers at Mount Rainier faced those decisions before the concept of what a national park should be was fully formed. The tender areas between use and preservation had never been explored before. As a result, their decisions sometimes set policy for the entire national park system.

Among the most tender of those areas was downhill skiing.

One of the main obstacles to tourism at Mount Rainier had always been the short tourist season. Except for a handful of intrepid snowshoers and cross-country skiers, few people visited the park in the wintertime.

But in the 1930s, interest in winter sports exploded. Tourism interests and ski entrepreneurs were delighted, realizing that a destination ski resort at Rainier would expand the tourist season from three months to 10 or 12.

Local boosters, ski associations, tourism lobbyists and sporting goods stores pushed the park to keep the road to Paradise open all winter and to build ski lifts and year-round hotels.

The park resisted. Keeping the roads open and operating winter facilities would be prohibitively expensive and dangerous. And increasingly, the park argued, the sport of downhill skiing, with all its mechanized trappings, was inappropriate in a national park.

Olympic ski trials at Paradise

Royal Brougham, the politically well-connected promoter and sports editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, persuaded then-state Rep. Warren G. Magnuson to power through a special $11,500 appropriation for snow removal in 1934, and he helped organize the annual Silver Skis Race at Paradise. The 1935 race served as the U.S. Olympic ski trials, attracted reporters from across the country and drew 2,000 cars and 7,500 spectators.

In the boom years that followed World War II, Mount Rainier was the top ski destination in the Pacific Northwest - despite the park service's reluctance and despite the fact there were no permanent lifts up the mountain.

Dee Molenaar, a park ranger in the 1940s who later wrote the classic climbing history, "The Challenge of Rainier," said drawing the line between alpine skiing and winter activities like cross-country skiing and snowshoeing was not difficult for him.

"Downhill skiing requires a lot more facilities," he said. "It's the same with things like golf and tennis. Leave them back in the lowlands. They don't belong up there."

The park doggedly resisted pressure to build permanent chairlifts and develop Rainier as a ski resort, despite painful political arm-twisting. During a visit to the Northwest in 1954, national parks director Conrad Wirth told audiences that he did not want a "Coney Island" at Mount Rainier.

Helen Engle, a Tacoma environmentalist and outdoors activist, fondly remembers skiing at Mount Rainier with her husband, Stan, after the war. They would park below Paradise at Narada Falls, shoulder their skis and hike a mile and a half to the lodge. There a rope tow powered by an eight-cylinder Ford engine took them to a high saddle above Paradise called Alta Vista, where they would adjust their goggles and schuss back down to the lodge.

"It was a wonderful time," she said. "But we were all opposed to permanent structures and a tram. In the summertime, that's such an intrusive thing. I think we were pretty much united in that."

The ski industry's attention was diverted in the 1950s as other ski resorts on mountain slopes better situated for skiing began to be developed elsewhere in the Cascades. The issue was more or less put to rest in 1960 when developers began building Crystal Mountain ski resort, just east of the park.

Push for a year-round hotel

With skiing or without, Washington's tourist industry continued to regard Mount Rainier as a resource going to waste. It was the biggest attraction in the region, they maintained, and a lack of overnight accommodations was robbing the state of millions in revenue.

Gov. Arthur Langlie, an advocate of a tramway and a year-round hotel at Paradise, agreed. Over the park's objections, he appointed tourism industry representatives to a committee in 1953 to explore development options.

To no one's surprise, the committee called for a modern, all-season hotel, complete with "swimming pool, tennis courts and spacious green lawns."

As always, the target customers were people from out of state.

"We local people just swap dollars among ourselves," said Clinton Reynolds, president of the Tacoma Chamber of Commerce and the Automobile Club of Washington. "The ones we are primarily interested in are the tourists who leave money here."

The Tacoma News Tribune, a consistent supporter of increased visitor access to the park, turned up the editorial heat, writing in 1956 that the federal government should build a year-round hotel to "make that wonderland the tourist center it should be."

The editor of the little Lakewood Log went further in 1957, advocating not only a year-round hotel but ski lifts and an aerial tramway from the Nisqually River bridge 1,600 vertical feet up to Paradise.

"Let them blast out a parking lot out of rock and fill along the Nisqually River to hold 10,000 automobiles," he wrote. "At 50 cents per day, Rainier National Park could be a gold mine for Park Service revenues and the park concessionaire the year round."

A year-round Rainier resort came close to reality in the early 1960s, when Gov. Albert Rosellini, U.S. Rep. Thor Tollefson of Tacoma and Senate heavyweights Magnuson and Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson joined forces to apply leverage on the Interior Department.

Rosellini wanted to use state and private money to finance a new hotel, a convention center and a ski resort.

"We must develop this great resource we have been blessed with," Rosellini said. "The development of Mount Rainier is important to the economics of the whole Pacific Northwest and Tacoma in particular. It is ridiculous we don't develop some of these things."

In three successive sessions of Congress, Washington representatives introduced resolutions that would authorize construction of a year-round hotel at Paradise.

Each time park service director Conrad Wirth and Interior Secretary Stewart Udall resisted. They objected on environmental grounds, maintaining that annual crowds already hovering near the 1 million mark were threatening the park's natural resources.

Their case was bolstered by the estimated cost to the government. A plan for a 300-room hotel at Paradise was projected to cost between $7 million and $12 million to build, plus a $300,000 yearly operating subsidy to break even.

Despite the Washington senators' heavy influence, the resolutions failed.

As a consolation prize for development interests, Jackson and Magnuson pushed through a $2 million visitors' center at Paradise. When the building was completed in 1966, its appearance was widely criticized. Many compared it to a flying saucer.

Park planners assailed its function, as well. They had been working to break up traffic jams at Paradise by dispersing people throughout the park. The new visitors' center, they said, would only make things worse.

The rise of environmentalism

The environmental movement of the 1970s tilted the political balance away from commercial development at Mount Rainier. The new environmentalism, combined with rapid population growth in Western Washington and an increasing awareness of the rate at which the state's forests were being cut, elevated the park's status nearly to that of a religious shrine. Talk about such things as airstrips at Sunrise and chairlifts at Paradise abruptly ended.

Ironically, the new environmentalism helped bring to Mount Rainier what local business interests had spent decades working toward: capacity crowds. People flocked to the park in such numbers during summer months that park employees complained that they worked for "Mount Rainier National Parking Lot."

With its 147 miles of roads, 240 miles of trails, two hotels and three visitors' centers, Rainier is overrun in the summertime.

Annual visitation topped 2 million for the first time in 1977 and continues to grow. The increase in the number of people attempting to climb the mountain has been especially dramatic - from 712 in 1960 to 9,000 last year.

In November 1988, nearly all of the land within the park was designated as a wilderness area under the federal Washington Park Wilderness Act. That added a layer of protection from commercialism, essentially banning development on all land not already covered by roads, buildings and parking lots.

Concern about crowding is so intense among park managers that they eyed plans for this year's centennial celebration warily. Their fear was that publicity would bring still more people to a park where visitors already crowd shoulder-to-shoulder in the gift shops and popular viewpoints at Paradise and tread on one another's heels on the asphalt trails above. Bill Briggle, who retired in January after 15 years as park superintendent, expressed great relief that most of the organized activities would take place in Tacoma, well away from the mountain.

As the 21st century nears, the park's crusade to restrict local developers is turning into a crusade to restrict visitors. So far, it's been no easy task.

Many of Mount Rainier's close neighbors, accustomed to using the park as they please, look with disdain on all efforts to relieve crowding - climbing restrictions, reservation systems and anything to limit cars in the park.

Even Dee Molenaar, one of the first climbing rangers, and a man who appreciates the geological wonders of the park like few others, grows irritated at what he sees as the park's increasingly authoritarian restrictions.

Shortly after his 80th birthday last year, Molenaar said he was climbing with friends above Paradise and stepped off the trail to snap a picture of them with the mountain as a backdrop.

"Right away there was a little rangerette there, telling me to stay on the trail,'' he said, shaking his head.

Park officials say they understand the frustration. But after spending the better part of a century protecting Mount Rainier from people who wanted to develop it, they are determined not to let it be overrun now - not even by those who love it.

(Published Feb. 28, 1999)