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.