Paradise Inn

My rustic room
at Paradise Inn

I spent Thursday night at Paradise Inn, a National Park lodge on the lower slopes (5,400 ft.) of Mount Rainier.  Jim, a friend with whom I hiked in Cornwall in May, and his small bicycling group were stopping for a couple of nights at Paradise as they biked their way from Lake Tahoe to Bellingham in northern Washington.  I met up with him there, as did contingents of his family from West Lafayette, Indiana, and Winthrop, Washington. 

It was fun to celebrate the success of Jim's bike tour to date, and to hang out with the rest of his family.  It was also fun to have an excuse to stay in a National Park lodge.

Like many such lodges, Paradise is a large, rustic building, constructed in a characteristic National Park style.  It is built around a structural framework of exposed cedar logs.  It was constructed in 1914 by a private developer.  Since 1952, it has been owned by the National Park Service, and operated by a private concessionaire.  In the 1970s, it was nearly demolished, but was instead renovated in the face of howls of outrage from the public.

Rainier National Park has a smaller, but similarly styled lodge -- Longmire -- a short distance inside the western entrance to the park.

National Park lodges characteristically have small, sparsely equipped rooms, but grandiose public places that can be enjoyed by day visitors as well as overnight guests -- similar to many grand hotels that were built during the same time period.  I consider the trade-off to be completely successful.  No one visits a National Park with the purpose of spending hours lying about a luxurious room watching wide-screen TV.  You are out hiking the trails, climbing the peaks, motoring the roads, and otherwise enjoying nature.  At night and for meals, you gather together in the spectacular lobby and dine on surprisingly good food in the adjoining dining room.

Paradise Inn is reminiscent of other National Park lodges I have stayed in or visited in recent years -- Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim of the canyon; El Tovar on the South Rim; Many Glacier Hotel on the east side of Glacier National Park and Lake McDonald Lodge on the west side; Lake Crescent Lodge and  Lake Quinault Lodge in Olympic National Park, and Crater Park Lodge in Oregon.  Of similar construction is Timberline Lodge at Oregon's Mount Hood, which is not inside a National Park, but is in a National Forest.

The most grandiose of lodges, but maybe the least characteristic, is Ahwahnee in Yosemite valley -- a luxury hotel of granite construction.  (It is now called, pathetically, "The Majestic Yosemite Hotel," because the former concessionaire had taken the precaution of copywriting the "Ahwahnee" name, and, in a snit, refused to allow the park to continue using the name when it lost the concession.)

I love all these lodges because, collectively, they remind me of vacations of my childhood.  Most of our visits to National Parks were done as auto-camping trips -- we couldn't afford the lodges.  Nevertheless, like most  park visitors, we hung out in them and bought our souvenirs at their gift shops. 

The one great exception that I recall was Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park -- a lodge built in a very similar style to that of Paradise Inn.  For a glorious one or two nights we actually stayed in the lodge as overnight guests.  As a ten-year-old, I was not too young to revel in the glory.

I suppose staying at any of these lodges now, which I do as often as possible, brings satisfactions that hearken back to my primal memories of Old Faithful Lodge, and to the pre-television, pre-internet world those lodges evoke.  Paradise Inn defiantly warns in its advertising that it provides no internet connections, and that its rooms have no television or private phones (although the Visitor Center a short walk away does have a small area with wi-fi service). 

These lodges offer a flashback to an earlier time, to a time when automobiles were rare, a time when guests were welcomed as they stepped from trains, trains run by the railway companies which also had built and operated the lodges.    Or, as in Paradise's case, which was located far from any railway, as they stepped from motor coaches.  A visit to a National Park, for many in those times, especially for those from the East Coast, was an adventure into a semi-primitive world, an adventure described in long letters and glowing post cards to the folks back home.

That world has passed away, but the lodges endure and flourish.  What's not to like?