2,000 set out to care for Rainier
Students lead repairs on storm-damaged Rainier
LONGMIRE -- Looking like a Civil War re-enactment, nine canvas tents sit in a row in the middle of an abandoned campground at Mount Rainier National Park.
Lined up next to the moss-covered remains of picnic tables, under towering Douglas firs, the tents and a converted carnival-concession trailer are base camp for the crew leaders who will be directing an army of 2,000 volunteers on the mountain this summer.
Never before has the 108-year-old park seen or relied upon such an outpouring of help.
In November and December, the mountain was pounded by two storms that took out sections of the Wonderland Trail, the road to Paradise and the Sunshine Point campground.
"It was unprecedented," said park Superintendent David Uberuaga of the damage delivered by 18 inches of rain falling in 36 hours and sustained winds clocked at more than 100 mph. "Every location throughout the park was damaged: every road, every campground, every trail."
Faced with a budget in decline for more than a decade and up to $10 million in backlogged maintenance projects, Uberuaga closed the park for six months and turned to volunteers and corporations for help.
There to orchestrate the effort was the Student Conservation Association, a non-profit that started 50 years ago Thursday working on trails at Olympic National Park.
The group didn't wait to be contacted. During the second storm, Jay Statz, who runs the Seattle SCA office, called Uberuaga for a status report. The park chief was stuck at home, sitting in the middle of his living room with the power out, listening to the sound of trees getting thrashed by the wind.
"Jay, how good of you to call," Uberuaga began.
As the winter snow covered the damage, Statz and Uberuaga worked out plans to tackle the repairs that would be needed after the spring thaw. The solution: a pool of laborers not seen since the Great Depression.
The volunteers are being maintained and managed by a coalition of non-profits, including Washington's National Park Fund, the Washington Trails Association, the National Parks Conservation Association and The Mountaineers.
Their job: get as many people as possible involved with helping the park -- from giving money and testimony in Washington, D.C., to breaking a sweat hauling gravel for washed-out trails.
Uberuaga and the Park Service hope the volunteers will feel a greater ownership of the park and support it when they return to their day jobs.
"It's a strategy we have used in part because of reduced staff," said Kevin Bacher, the new volunteer coordinator at Rainier. "But also the government is the people, and the parks are our parks. ... They are good as they make them."
At the top of the list are people like Aaron Fumarola, a 22-year-old New Yorker who's spending the summer on Rainier, living in one of the tents.
"It reminds me a lot of dorm living," he said.
Fumarola and nine others are being paid $100 a week to run crews of volunteers tasked with fixing the park's battered trails and roads.
"It's pretty intense," he said. "This whole experience had been surreal -- the fact that I'm so far from home, that I have never done work like this before. It's not always fun, but being able to live in Longmire and in the national park has been quite rewarding so far."
Continue reading this article from the Seattle P-I:
2,000 set out to care for Rainier
