Mount Rainier Behind the Scenery

What goes on behind the scenes to operate a park like Mount Rainier National Park? From historic preservation to ecological restoration and more, park staff work in a wide variety of areas to protect and maintain Mount Rainier's natural and cultural landscapes for current and future visitors. Watch the videos below to discover some of what goes on "behind the scenery" of Mount Rainier!

 

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SB = Sueann Brown, Historic Architect BM = Barry McMongle, Lead Carpenter & Log Builder

SB: Ok, I’m standing on the Chinook Arch. This was built by the Civilian Conservation Corp in 1936 to mark the entry to the park. Preserving this arch, there is so much that goes into it. Particularly with it being a historic arch, you know, having to really match the historic detailing exactly, and part of what’s really cool is that we have on our staff such really skilled people that, because we have Rustic Architecture throughout the park, and we have all this log work that needs to be done, they’ve become really skilled at that kind of work. This clearly is on a much more massive scale than just replacing a few logs here and there in a back country cabin, but you know since they’ve been doing that for years they’re- not only are they skilled- but they’re really good about just taking on new challenges. And, so, to do something like this that probably scare the heck out of a lot of people, you know, replacing these logs that span this entire roadway, getting everything to fit just exactly right to match the historic configuration- they welcome those kind of challenges and they figure out how to get it done.

SB: Yeah, we wanted to get everything to go back in exactly the configuration it was before it was removed so they had to number each of the rocks, photograph the way it was before they took it apart, set all that aside, then replace the logs, and then set the stone work back in place. What we did was we took out the logs one season, brought the original logs down to Kautz Creek so that we could work on the logs in the off season, when this area was closed off. They brought the old log down there so they could use that as a guide for reconfiguring all the logs, and then the following season bring them back up and set them back into place.

BM: It was almost ready to fall down last year so we had to cut it out and it just rotted. So it’s a timber structure- hundred percent timber structure- western red cedar, old growth. We were able to find downed timber to replace it almost exactly in-kind. This log is about fifteen thousand pounds, that log is about twelve thousand pounds, so they’re pretty heavy.

Duration:

4 minutes, 45 seconds

The Chinook Entrance Arch spans the width of the Mather Memorial Parkway (SR 410) at 5,432 feet on the northeastern boundary of the park. The arch was designed as both an entrance portal and an equestrian overpass, to convey hikers and riders on the Pacific Crest Trail. Built in 1936 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, the rustic-style arch became deteriorated by the elements and nearly eight decades of use, prompting Mount Rainier National Park to undertake a massive restoration project to preserve this historic structure.

 

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Ecological Restoration: A Season at Mount Rainier Film Transcript

Will Arnesen (WA): The reason for an Ecological Restoration program here at Mount Rainier National Park is basically to preserve the natural ecosystem as it is without human impacts being put on the landscape. In general, simply put two ways that we commonly see impacts on a landscape here is introduction of non-native plants- invasive species- as well as then just our effects of using the landscape. One of the most common ways is off-trail travel- basically just going off that trail impacting the vegetation; and because of how many visitors we have at the park you’ll have that impact happen quite quickly.

WA: Well, right now we’re in middle of May, and all of the production that’s happening in the greenhouse is internal. Seeds are being brought out, being sown on seed flats, and then staged inside the greenhouse; being kept moist. Course now they’re receiving the light, and it’s in a temperature controlled environment. You’re going to get those seedlings to pop up on a seed tray. Then the transplant is going to happen, and they’re going to tease all those plants out and get them put into pots. In essence, always trying to get one plant per pot. You’re going to have those pots then once they’ve been established, they’re going to start growing and be brought outside. And they’ll be stored outside and continue growing out here. They will be underneath the shade structure here as well as in the back, depending on kind of what their exposure is. Evan Hayduck (EH): I’m Evan Hayduck. I’m the crew lead here at the greenhouse. This is the transplanting process here. We’re taking the seeds that were sowed about a month ago, teasing them into individual plants and putting them individually into pots. There’s forty-nine pots per flat, and we’re doing about eighty-five thousand plants this year. So, those will go into the greenhouse for about a week to let them get a start on life and then we’ll take them outside and keep them watered and look for any fungus or bugs that might be growing on them. Just general maintenance after that.

WA: Ways that we commonly see impacts on a landscape is introduction of non-native plants- invasive species. So exotic plant removal in this park pretty much for a crew season is June through late August, maybe some work in September. So we start low elevation and work uphill. In general, all of the exotic plants that we’re controlling are along our highways. Thankfully, it appears that the wilderness is pretty clean. The other part of that is that you’re either uphill or downhill usually in this park and your plants- the exotic plants- they don’t know uphill or downhill. As a person who needs to come in and control it, you look over that slope and you realize that the plants are hundreds of feet down either a very steep slope or possibly off a cliff and that doesn’t stop us as a crew. The Restoration program definitely takes advantage of doing rappel work in the park. In a number of spots we’ll rappel off of potentially cliffs, going down, chasing those plants down there.

[garbled radio communication]

WA: We definitely with the Restoration program use helicopters. It’s definitely one of these essential tools in certain scenarios that we have to take advantage of. The helicopter allows us to move a large amount of material in a short amount of time. You can image at Mount Rainier that many of the locations that we might be planting at might be remote and even if they’re not remote, they might be a mile and a half to two miles on a trail. So an area like Paradise even doesn’t necessarily feel very remote because you can see the work site, it’s a mile and a half to two miles out on a trail that we might be working, and it’s all potentially uphill. One flat- one tray of our plants, forty-nine pots, weighs about twenty-three pounds. You start adding up how much- you know forty-nine plants is twenty-three pounds, but we’re going to move forty thousand plants to the site, and you can start quickly figuring out how much weight that’s going to be and how much time. So basically the helicopter comes into to do that, to move the plants into the work site, to get it established; and to do it in a short time because the other part of that too is that getting our plants out there, the staging and movement of these plants, is they are living plants. We need to get them out there, we need to treat them accordingly as a living plant. But yeah the helicopter is an essential component to I imagine any park that is dealing with remote locations.

WA: The Restoration program finished this year with roughly thirty thousand plants at Paradise. It was an eighty thousand plant year though. We did, well, we were planting eighty thousand plants but the greenhouse is very successful and they grew us an extra five thousand to plant, which we did. So, approximately eighty-five thousand plants were grown this year and planted, fifty thousand of those being over at Sunrise. Every plant that goes into the ground is going to be watered until end of season, either which is going to be rainfall, and then eventually snow. If we’re not getting the rain, it’s all hand-watering and we’re going to keep watering them weekly and so there’s a large element of work there, cause you’re trying to plant, but every time you’re watering you’re basically taking people out of the role of planting. So it’s a tradeoff. Going into September allows us to get that rainfall and keep the plants very healthy that way. Once we go to snow, snow is a blessing to the plants as well, not to the work. It’ll shut us down, if we get too much snow, we’re done. The snow will stop our season. It’s what begins our season and ends our season. But as far as the plants, we have a ninety percent or better success rate with the vegetation that we plant. Remember they’re all native plants, they all originally would have been here in time, from parents that live right next to the site, perennial stock. So they’re very well suited to the area and once the snow hits, it’s basically just sending them into a dormancy. They’re treating it like any of the native plants in the area, and all the native plants around us survive, and these plants we’re planting follow the exact same rules so they survive just as well. After that year of planting, the year that we plant them, we never water them again, and we don’t do anything with them, they’re just now part of the natural, native landscape, and that ninety percent or better success rate persists. The only way we loose them, and we loose them very quickly, is if we get repetitive use again. If for some reason, whatever the factor was causing off-trail travel, causing the social trial, that impact to happen the first time, isn’t stopped, we’ll loose a planting within the next year- you’ll see an immediate loss of species; and then maybe you know the second year after planting, you’re noticing that most of your plants are again dead, that you’re going back to a bare-ground impact.

WA: Anything over eighty thousand plants a year, as the program is now, couldn’t be accomplished without the effort of volunteers. We’ll have easily on a weekend in September, we’ll have volunteers, maybe a good weekend, a big number, would be a hundred plus volunteers- we do have those weekends, and we have them repetitively, season after season- and it’s quite easy on a day like that to plant eighteen to twenty thousand plants in one day. And when you’re looking at the numbers and you’re saying you’re trying to get fifty thousand, like we did this year at Sunrise, planted and you can do twenty thousand in one day with volunteers it’s a tremendous amount of help. I always remind all of the volunteers, both for the education volunteer side of it as well as those who came out you know just to get some hard work and to spend many hours during the day, is that the vegetation that they plant, the plants they plant, stay; and if we’ve done our job right as a program, we’ve picked an area that we can protect and vegetation is going to persist and potentially they should be able to come back you know fifty years from now and see that same vegetation there, see the same plants growing, and I think that’s a huge reward for a lot of our youngest volunteers to think about, you know they can come back and see that. And we’ve had school groups come through and some of the students coming back for their second or even third year, and they’ll go pick out the plants that they planted the year before, and it’s great because they can actually see that I was telling the truth that their plants survive and actually live. So, that’s pretty rewarding but they’re also kind of becoming stewards of the mountain, you know, of these resources, and I think they carry that with them.

Duration:

9 minutes, 57 seconds

Follow Mount Rainier's Ecological Restoration program through its season, from growing native seedlings in the greenhouse to planting in the fall at Sunrise and Paradise. The Ecological Restoration program also controls invasive plants in the park, and uses everything from rappel work to helicopters to protect the natural vegetation of Mount Rainier National Park and minimize human impact.

 

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In winter, visitors to Mount Rainier really look forward to the opening of this gate to Paradise.

Seems pretty easy, doesn’t it? All you have to do is swing open the gate- but it may not happen everyday, or at a regular hour. Mount Rainier creates an extreme and sometimes dangerous environment so the road only opens if it’s deemed generally safe for travel.

So how do we determine that? Well, first let’s back up a little….

… to REALLY early in the morning. It’s about 5 a.m. and the Mount Rainier road crew is just heading out for the day.

It’s not unusual for a single storm to dump 30 inches of snow or more in 24 hours! So the first step in opening the road is getting all that snow off the road.

Remember, the road to paradise is not like other roads. It was designed to allow the visitor experience to unfold. To take people through tall trees and show them glacially-carved valleys, and of course- the mountain. It was built between 1904 and 1910, over a century ago, and it was built to the standards of the day. Which is to say, compared to modern roads it is narrow, steep, and winding. Even in the best conditions it needs to be driven carefully. And in bad conditions, a spectacular drive can quickly turn disastrous.

As you know, if Pacific Northwest weather isn’t bringing snow to the park, it’s sure to be bringing rain.

Wet roads can be slippery all on their own, but at higher elevations that rain means ice on the roadway. That ice, combined with snow and the steep, winding nature of the road, can make it a challenge to safely drive up and down the mountain.

As a National Park, we don’t use any salt or chemicals on the road that may harm the vegetation or wildlife. Some ice on the roads is the norm, not the exception. Which is why every visitor is required to carry tire chains in their vehicle- and that includes those with 4 wheel or all-wheel drive vehicles- and you need to know how to use them.

There’s another danger– a hidden danger- avalanches. The risk of avalanches can be high even on a sunny day.

The park does not use explosives or cannons to mitigate avalanches, but snowpack and the resulting slides, are left to occur naturally, as are other processes in this natural environment. Though it can sometimes mean a longer wait before the road is cleared for travel.

Park staff consult with the Northwest Avalanche Center daily to assess avalanche risk before we can open the road.

Wherever there are cars, there are car wrecks and collisions, including here at Mount Rainier. Remember, you are ultimately responsible for your safety on the mountain. We want you to enjoy your visit, so we only open the road when we have enough staff to get the road in good shape and to provide the services, including emergency services, that you’ll need while you're here.

So, a lot goes into opening this gate to Paradise. If you’re headed this way, check the weather forecast, and look for the road status update on twitter. And the park webcams are an excellent way to get a sense of current conditions. And then bundle up- we’ll see you here!

Duration:

4 minutes, 38 seconds

During the winter, reaching Paradise is not as simple as just swinging a gate open. Much is done to ensure that visitors have a safe and enjoyable visit. Learn what goes into opening this unique road during the winter season.

 

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Transcripts of 2015 Ohanapecosh Archaeology Project

[Greg Burtchard] Well my name is Greg Burtchard. I'm the archaeologist here at Mount Rainier National Park. I also coordinate Indian relations with the park. We're standing here at Ohanapecosh Campground, at the southeast corner of Mount Rainier National Park, which we've got an archaeological site that I think is of some importance to the park. So we've got about 110 archaeological properties documented all around the mountain, dating to as early as 9,000 years ago. So we've got - this is a site map a working site map of Ohanapecosh Campground, southeast corner of Mount Rainier National Park. In 2014, we were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to do archaeological testing in advance of the new utility line route that was replacing an older one that was about 40 or 50 years old, that's aging. In advance of that route, we were excavated Constant Volume Samples--

The system we call Constant Volume Sampling, which essentially uses a special in-curved handled post hole digger, that allows us to dig 30 centimeter diameter holes at a consistent diameter, perfectly nice cylinders down to about a meter and a half.

-- along that route, every where you see a red dot on this map. Along the road line, around the road- - campground road loops and into the campground facilities, restroom areas, power boxes, things like that. This by the way is the Ohanapecosh River and these are the various campground loops in the campground. In the process of doing that we located our first four low elevation archaeological sites, pre-contact archaeological sites, ever recorded at Mount Rainier. So finding four sites, intact, in situ, at a low elevation place where none had ever been documented before, nor was there any indication of a presence here on the surface at that time was a big deal. And so working off of that success from last year, the park has authorized us to sample the landscape now more broadly to see if the pattern that we observed in the utility lines is general to the landscape as a whole. So what we did in that process was set up a grid system. Every where there is a cross was an excavation point for where we did constant volume sampling and in the process of doing that, isolated a series of about 20 more positive units that had chip stone tool remains at varying depths. One reason that this works is that tool stone- stone tools for piercing and cutting and scraping work well. It makes a fine sharp edge. The problem is they break a lot. It's very fragile, it's brittle. So for us that's handy, because in the process of repairing and refurbishing these tools, which has to be done daily, people in the past generate a rain or a deposit of this chip stone tool remains where they've been repaired and even though the tools themselves are saved and taken away, they still leave behind enough of the repair material that we can identify where people sat in the past and did these things. So what we do then in these samples is - sampling system- is to separate the intact sediment, the in situ sediments, from tool stone materials. These are cherts and obsidians, things like that.

[Eric Gleason] So here at this area of the site, what we initially did is we opened up that little constant volume sample in the corner and when that turned out to be positive after doing several others in the area, we decided to expand on that area. So first we excavated a 1-meter by 1-meter square unit which Cory is standing in at this time and we had pretty good results from that. The recovery of pretty much matched what we had found in the constant volume sample and we also recovered one tool from there. We also noticed as we excavated that the stratigraphic layers, the layers of different ash falls that have built over time to form this campground, were fairly intact, had not been disturbed too much by the forest that has grown up here over the last thousands of years and so that made us really want to expand on that unit because the less disturbance we have, the better idea we have of exactly where in that profile of different ash layers that artifacts are coming from and we have a better chance of finding them kind of where they were dropped at that time.

[Corrine Michel] So what I'm doing now is I'm just skimming a real thin amount of dirt off the test unit at a time and we skim just really small amounts so that hopefully we can find artifacts in place and then that gives us more information as to the time frame that they came from. After I skim the dirt off we bucket it and go sift the dirt in the screening area over there. and then anything that's found in the screen is bagged for this particular level that we're in.

[Greg Burtchard] And we're testing a number of the locations across the Ohanapecosh area in which we had positive results. So this is another test unit.

[Jacqueline Cheung] These are flakes we found today and then sometimes we collect rocks that kind of look like they might be flakes and we can look at those more closely later. So we're getting maybe about like 12 to 20 flakes per level.

[Eric Gleason] What happened was right above that Mount Mazama ash we found a diagnostic artifact, a temporally diagnostic artifact, which was pretty exciting. So this is what would have been the base of a spear or dart-sized point and a similar one was found at an archaeological site not far from here and this is about where it would fit on that complete point. So it's just the base, the hefting element, of the point. This style of point is generally associated with earlier occupations in this area and finding this point style helps us kind of more firmly establish that this is an early site. All of these points are from a fairly early site that was excavated nearby probably with an age range somewhere between 7,300 and 7,900 years old.

[Greg Burtchard] So right now our working interpretation is that folks moved seasonally up into high elevation landscapes along various routes into Mount Rainier, with this being one of them. Making short term stops along the river on their way up to higher elevation ground where folks were seasonally gathering resources of use to them. Huckleberries, marmots, mountain beaver, glacier lily, elk, mountain goats- mountain goats perhaps foremost of all. Things that aren't available at low elevations landscapes and bringing them back. The modern representatives of people who have been in this area for a very long period of time are still here. They have different names. They have names that were applied by treaties, but they include such groups around Mount Rainier as the Nisqually Indian Tribe, the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, Squaxin Island Indian Tribe, and others, that reside in this vicinity that were signatories to various treaties, and some didin't sign treaties, but those folks are still here. And their ancestors were here before them and I hope this helps make people aware that Native American people aren't just an artifact of the last two hundred years or of their treaties. That they have a past that goes on for a very long period of time and they used landscapes like Mount Rainier through much of that period of time, for at least 9,000 years.

Duration:

8 minutes, 32 seconds

Mount Rainier is a well known symbol in the Washington landscape. But how far back does people's relationship with Mount Rainier go? An archaeology project in 2015 at Ohanapecosh campground found evidence that native people have been traveling to and living around Mount Rainier for thousands of years.