Conscious Choice: Two Tickets to Paradise...Inn

July 2008 | Escape the Pace

Two Tickets to Paradise...Inn

After two long years, Mount Rainier’s beloved lodge reopens

By Crai S. Bower

I suppose that most of us share a need for lookouts and overlooks, mountain peaks, hilltops or towers, places where we can view familiar landscapes in perspective.
—C. John Burke

I felt a bit envious when I heard a tale of some traveler peregrinating the land to survey every major league ballpark. All that travel to tick off a list. My trek of ecstasy — complete with list ticking — would chronicle a visit to each and every national park lodge. This is why I was first in line when Mt. Rainier’s Paradise Inn reopened after a two-year, $20 million
renovation.

Summer (aka, when the snow finally melts) at Mt. Rainier bedazzles the casual or hardcore hiker. Paradise unfolds a wildflower canvas like few other floral brushstrokes on the entire continent. Mountain and fleabane daisies, native columbine, violets, two species of saxifrage and three varieties of monkeyflower are just one bouquet of the hundred species of common blooms that spill off the trail between the Nisqually Glacier and Paradise Inn.

Visiting Mt. Rainier may be one of the few dividends from spikes in energy costs and the flattening economy. We locals may actually have more of the mountain to ourselves this summer. (Caveat: This could also be the year when Europe — mountain lovers and all — descends upon the park with the ferocity of the tiny calliope hummingbird, a summer resident.)

It’s true that visits to these wild shrines shouldn’t consist of too much time spent indoors. Given the rest of our environment, national parks are almost pornographic in their excess of unobstructed wilderness, a bevy of trails and valleys seen by but a handful of the thousands who visit the parking lots and visitor centers. The reward from delving deeply into these parks is isolation from the masses, so I’m not suggesting that visitors to the 235, 404-acre park tether themselves to Paradise Inn.

Still, Paradise Inn serves as a fine rustic shelter, which it remains after the largely structural renovation. Don’t expect a sparkling room or a quick cup of tea, though in deference to pampered travelers, a café has opened for the latté dependent.

So grab your Darjeeling tea and, after a strenuous hike among the purple asters and avalanche lilies, spill into an overstuffed chair in front of a crevasse-deep fireplace, take out your tattered copy of John Muir’s journals (he visited in the 1880s) and promptly take a nap. Muir would find the idea of nature possessing a living room repugnant, but oh well, I’ll say it: Paradise Inn’s great room feels as close to nature’s living room as any human-made structure anywhere.

Stone fireplaces bookend the commodious 221 x 50-foot, two-tiered space, a lattice of cedar purls across the 50-foot-tall ceiling and deep sofas populate the floor. The granddaddy of the hall remains Hans Fraehnke’s 1919 grandfather clock, as well as the 20-foot table, where one easily imagines a banquet celebrating Franklin Roosevelt, who visited the Inn when president.

Tea is served each afternoon on the mezzanine level, where tables are placed every fifteen feet, allowing an opportunity to disappear beneath the rafters and read, write or play a board game while surveying the visitors as they scurry below. (Warning: watch the pipes when getting up or sitting down — they won’t move, no matter how hard you bash them with your forehead!). The second level also provides the best viewpoint for admiring the hand-painted lamp shades, each displaying an indigenous flower in full bloom. Fortunately, rose mauling this is not; the dozen illustrations are more suited to a botanical guide than to whimsy. But there is certainly plenty of mirthful aesthetic to be found, especially in the upright piano encased in natural, rough-hewn cedar, suggestive of what Harry S. Truman (who played when he visited) might discover should he wander into Bilbo Baggins’ hut.

As with hobbits, a mix of frivolity and realism has long been the standard inside the great parks’ lodges and inns. This arboreal ambience may tiptoe into the silly: “Mail slot located in wood stump in lobby.” Yet, considering we have spent our sylvan days witnessing our insignificance beneath the Northwest’s greatest monument, a well-deserved repose in a majestic hall isn’t such a bad way to end the day.

Crai S. Bower received a 2008 “Northern Lights Award for Excellence in Canadian Travel Journalism” this April. Check out the winning story: www.flowingstreamwriting.net

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