Flooding renews debate over humans' influence on nature

At the time, driving a bulldozer into Mount Rainier's wilderness seemed like a good idea.

A storm starting on Nov. 6 had dumped nearly 18 inches of rain on the mountain in 36 hours. Rivers poured from their banks and sliced through road after road throughout Mount Rainier National Park.

A campground was mostly gone. The Carbon River Road had become part of the river. An 80-foot-deep gash cut across the highway. It was the most destructive natural disaster in the park's history. For the first time ever, the entire place was closed to visitors.

Nine days after the flooding started, Kautz Creek, a tributary of the Nisqually River, was still hammering against the side of the park's most important road, which leads to the historic Longmire cabins six miles in from the park's southwest corner and up to the snowfields of Paradise, a popular visitor area high on the mountain's southwest slopes.

So, on Nov. 15, with the blessing of the park's top brass, a maintenance crew steered a bulldozer into the woods. Their mission: Drive a mile and a half through protected wilderness to where the creek had left its original streambed. Then pile up rocks to force the water back where it used to flow.

It might have happened that way, except for park ranger Steve Klump. As he drove out of the park that evening, he noticed a muddy track heading off the road.

The next morning, he walked up the half-mile path already gouged out. He saw trees uprooted and moss beds cut to shreds. This in a part of the park where it's illegal to fire up a chainsaw without special permission.

"I was pissed off," recalled Klump, whose job is to make sure everyone treats Mount Rainier's wilderness with care.

So he started phoning the park's top bureaucrats. The next day, the bulldozer was turned around and driven back out.

The incident is emblematic of a conundrum at the very heart of the country's national parks, none more than Mount Rainier.

Is a national park supposed to be a crown jewel of American wilderness, a place protected from the bulldozers and strip malls that define much of our lives? Or is it a "park," an outdoor playground for the masses, shaped for everyone's enjoyment and run to help businesses profit along the way?

To put it more bluntly: Do you drive a bulldozer into the wilderness to protect a road?

The floods of last November, and the rush to repair the damage, give new life to the debate. The outcome will influence how this centerpiece of the Northwest landscape is experienced, which roads reopen, even where rivers flow.

From its start in 1899, Mount Rainier National Park was born to dueling parents.

On the one hand were the stirrings of the modern conservation movement, spurred on by the writings of people like John Muir. On the other, there was the impulse to help people get into the woods, and to make a buck doing it.

A drive up the Nisqually Road to Paradise is a trip through that history.

Go past Longmire, where James Longmire once ran a small hotel, one of the first tourist enterprises inside the park. From there, the road itself, hewn from the mountain between 1904 and 1910, was the first major route into the park for drivers.

Cross the bridge over Christine Falls. Reconstructed in the 1920s, at the height of a building frenzy that cut roads into every corner of the park, the bridge and falls embody an early wilderness aesthetic that seems bizarre today.

Each stone was hand hewn from a local quarry, to mimic the surrounding landscape. Rock faces blasted away to make room for the new road were carefully sculpted to disguise the damage.

Yet Christine Falls, the subject of landscape photographers and gawking tourists, is a fake. Workers dynamited away large chunks of rock to create the sheer, 75-foot plunge of water.

In the early 20th century, roads and cars were largely welcome. National Park Service leaders saw them as a way to get people into the area and build support for the fledgling park system. Businesses saw them as the means to attract people willing to spend money, and to promote the entire region.

At Paradise, where the road ends, is the massive Paradise Inn, built in 1916 by local businessmen. The pattern of a nine-hole golf course from the 1930s is still visible in the meadows nearby.

But even in the early days, there was some unease with all the construction.

In 1906, acting Superintendent Grenville Allen opposed letting cars into the park, warning "the presence of these contrivances would be a source of great annoyance." A year later, the Interior secretary overruled him.

A loop road for sightseers at Paradise was blocked, despite the wishes of Henry Rhodes, president of the company that built the lodge. His protest echoes an argument often raised for construction in the park: "Without this route," he wrote to the Park Service, "visitors are denied opportunity to witness the marvelous spectacle to be enjoyed only from a location at the Glacier Rim."

There are other things you won't see at Paradise.

After World War II, as the number of visitors soared from a pre-war peak of 457,000 to 877,000 in 1952, pressure grew for even more access. But so did anxiety that things were going too far. There was the chairlift to carry winter visitors to the steep slopes above Paradise, or the full-scale resort at Paradise, complete with swimming pool, tennis courts and a modern hotel _ ideas all squelched.

Edward Abbey, the irascible writer and environmentalist, captured some of the objections in his 1968 book "Desert Solitaire," based on his time working at what would become Arches National Park.

"We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture," he wrote. "We should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places."

Today, the push and pull over what's best for national parks continues.

At Yellowstone National Park there's a running battle about whether to continue letting in snowmobiles. Yosemite National Park is caught in lawsuits about, among other things, whether to restrict how many people come to Yosemite Valley. The fight emerged after a 1997 flood forced the park to examine how to rebuild.

In a windowless room at Mount Rainier headquarters in late February, Park Service employees weighed what to do about their flood damage.

By February, the bulldozer had been ruled out at Kautz Creek.

The immediate threat of the flood was gone. And an environmental group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), had learned of the incident and was warning of possible violations of the federal Wilderness Act.

But the pressure to reopen was immense. Businesses in Ashford, six miles from the park gate, suffered without the trickle of winter visitors. U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., had come to see the damage and find out how soon the area would open.

Eric Walkinshaw, a Park Service engineer, held up a blueprint for the new plan. The feds would try to force the creek to stay in its new course, hoping to keep it from again changing direction and wiping out a different section of road. It would involve clear-cutting a grove of trees, digging a huge trench 150 feet up a hillside and installing two massive 12-foot-wide culverts beneath the road. They would tiptoe up to the edge of the protected wilderness.

"It's not going to be pretty," warned Lucy Gonyea, head of the park's maintenance program.

It's also temporary.

Another flood could overwhelm even these massive culverts. Or the river could pick another route.

Kautz Creek is one of the rivers on Mount Rainier telling Paul Kennard one thing since the flood: Expect more of this.

In late April, he stood in a field of river-worn rocks lining Tahoma Creek and looked downstream to where the road to Paradise crossed a bridge.

Before the flood, Kennard could have easily walked under the bridge. Now he would have to crouch. The flooding river washed tons of rocks down from the upper flanks of the mountain and scattered them here. It raised the creek four feet in a matter of days _ something that in the past could have taken 40 years.

"It's just by the grace of God that this bridge didn't get washed out," says Kennard, a Park Service scientist who specializes in how forces like rivers reshape the landscape.

All around the park, the rivers are filling with gravel and rising higher. As they do, the threat of flooding grows for roads built decades ago.

Rivers naturally wash rocks downstream. But here it's happening faster as glaciers recede, exposing fields of loose gravel and rocks. A rainstorm can spawn a slurry of mud so powerful it floats large boulders. Kennard suspects that Kautz Creek left its old channel during the flood after debris dammed it up.

On Tahoma Creek, he was investigating a new offshoot created by the flood. It sluiced into the woods, dug a channel seven feet deep at some points, flooded a road and eventually washed away part of Sunshine Campground.

Now the new streambed was dry. But evidence of the river's force remained. Massive, centuries-old cedars and Douglas firs lay on their sides, toppled by the water. Silt and boulders the size of a person's head covered a swath of the forest floor, marking where Tahoma Creek left its banks.

"Can you imagine what this looked like when it happened?" Kennard asks.

As scientists try to predict the likelihood of more flooding, the rising rivers are forcing a question on park managers and us. Are we willing to do big, costly projects to hold onto the roads and buildings we've got? If so, can we accept the damage it will inevitably do to the land and rivers the park is supposed to protect? And is this concern just a little bit precious, given the havoc the mountain itself is capable of creating?

The basic repairs from this flood alone are estimated at $36 million, and that doesn't count more elaborate, permanent fixes. A bridge that could withstand the movements of Kautz Creek, for example, could cost millions, on top of the $600,000 for the quick fix. This for a Park Service that has been strapped for cash.

Today, no one talks of a return to the road-building, expansionist era of the first half of the 20th century. Now, the overall discussion gives wilderness more weight.

Klump, the ranger who objected to the Kautz Creek bulldozer incident, noted that 20 or 30 years ago people wouldn't have thought twice about such work. But the focus has shifted _ largely to whether to preserve what we had before the floods or adapt to a world in which the human footprint inside Mount Rainier actually shrinks.

The park leadership, so far, has shown little appetite for letting go of what it has.

Park Superintendent Dave Uberuaga talks about the importance of preserving people's routes into the park, as well as the historic significance of the roads and buildings. Strange as it might seem, the road system itself is designated as a national historic landmark.

But that approach comes with potential costs, both in dollars and to the environment.

At Longmire in the historic heart of park operations, for instance, the Park Service is considering potentially expensive barriers to ward off the Nisqually River, which washed away sewer lines and lapped at the doorstep of a building during the flood. After the flood, a Park Service worker drove a bulldozer into the river there and scooped out the streambed to make it deeper.

But to Michael Pollock, a federal scientist at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, the dug-out riverbed looked like demolished fish habitat that could worsen flood problems downstream as the river races through the newly straightened channel.

Pollock, who stresses he is not representing an official agency position, says, "It seems as though they got away with bending the rules more than any other agency _ and certainly any other private company would be allowed to do."

The biggest struggle between wilderness and access, though, may be over a little-known five-mile gravel road in the park's northwest corner.

To get to the Carbon River Road, head south out of Enumclaw, ease through tiny Wilkeson, wind along a narrow two-lane road past an encampment of decrepit mobile homes and park where the pavement ends at a tiny ranger station.

Here begins the Carbon River Road. Or what's left of it.

A mile and a half through a lush old-growth forest, the gravel road vanishes. A rocky streambed angles in from the right. Falls Creek tumbles merrily among the boulders. That's where the road used to be.

The road was flood damaged and fixed in 1995, 1996, 1999, 2003 and 2005. According to the Park Service's own words, it probably shouldn't be fixed this time.

In 2002, in its 20-year development plan, the Park Service warned it can't keep repairing the road without damaging the Carbon River. So the next time there was a major washout, the road would be closed to cars.

But Uberuaga now says he wants to rebuild at least part of the road, if it can be done without hurting the river. That's partly to preserve easy access to the Carbon Glacier, just a short 3 {-mile hike from a campground at the road's end.

"I believe it's worth the risk to rebuild," Uberuaga told the Washington Trails Association in early February.

This part of the park draws few tourists. But it's a popular retreat for locals like Mark Couper, who takes his kids there in the summer. On a recent weekday, he sat at the bar in the Pick N Shovel, one of Wilkeson's two restaurants, polishing off a lunch of rib-eye steak and fries.

"I think it would be a travesty if they shut that place down," Couper said. "If you can't get in there, then how do you enjoy it?"

Not everyone agrees, of course. PEER, the environmental group, recently sent a letter to the Park Service protesting that Uberuaga seemed to have made up his mind before an environmental review has even been done.

It's not clear if the road will get repaired. That's partly because bull trout, protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, live in the Carbon River. And the deep pools of the new creek look like good fish habitat.

Beneath the surface of talk about the Carbon River Road lies the persistent question of wilderness versus civilization inside the park.

When do you let the rumble of pickups and the glare of headlights pierce the woods as people try to push deeper toward their favorite campsite?

And when do you let the forest go quiet, like it was as dusk dimmed into an April night and Heather Moran and Ben Wright picked their way through the towering firs in scuba-diving suits?

The two Park Service biologists, armed with mask, snorkel and flashlight, were there to find out if bull trout really had arrived. The fish feed at night, so that's when Moran and Wright went looking.

At the last deep pool before the stream disappeared into a tangle of logs, they stopped. The water, a dark void flanked by the pale stream bank.

If you see a bear or mountain lion, said Wright, let us know.

He went first, kneeling in the 45-degree water, then lying down in it, gripping the river bottom to pull himself gently upstream. A small circle of light opened beneath him as he turned on the flashlight. Moran followed him into the water, watching for strays he might miss.

In the first pool, only a common brook trout.

After wading through a shallow section, again they lowered themselves into the edge of another deep stretch. Halfway through, Wright started making noises and moving the flashlight around. As the two emerged from the water, he turned to Moran:

Hey Heather, I just saw a bull trout in there.

The next pool held several more. And the pool after that, another.

Suddenly, rebuilding this road had gotten a lot more complicated.

The pair lowered themselves into yet another stretch.

Quietly, they glided upstream scanning for fish, their lights flickering back and forth like two fireflies.

Then, they reached a massive fallen tree bridging the creek. As they slipped underneath, their lights winked from view. The water went dark.

All was silent, except for the murmur of the creek and the hush of the distant river. The soaring silhouettes of trees blocked out all but a glimpse of the gray, moonlit clouds above. It felt like a place where no one had ever been.