Mount Rainier’s Sunrise and White River: 7,000 years of visitors, a mine and a road

Native people have been visiting the Sunrise area of Mount Rainier National Park for at least 7,000 years, but the mine that lured settlers there produced very little ore. This National Park Service article tells the history of the park's northeast corner, made up of the White River and Sunrise areas, from first peoples to the roads and lodges that followed.

Buildings and road at Sunrise beneath the glaciers and summit of Mount Rainier, seen from the Sourdough Ridge Trail, 2015. Photo: NPS/C. Meleedy.

A landscape that drew people

Water from glaciers on the northeast side of Mount Rainier gathers into the White River, which drops from subalpine meadows through huge lava flows and steep valleys and leaves the park at its northeast corner. Archeologists have found stone flakes from toolmaking and other traces of the first peoples who were drawn to the subalpine area, especially around Sunrise. Generations of Native people traveled up the river valleys and over passes to hunt and gather food.

A grouse near Sunrise. Photo: NPS/S. Siegers.

Mining in Glacier Basin

Settlers from the Seattle and Tacoma areas came up the White River to look for copper, gold and silver. In 1902 the owners and employees of the Mount Rainier Mining Company began to stake claims in Glacier Basin, at the upper end of the valley. They tried several mines and built a tramway, work buildings and an access road. Rangers who later examined the company's paperwork found that very little ore had actually been mined. The original owners were sentenced by the State of Washington to 18 months and a $1,000 fine for mail fraud against investors in the Seattle area.

Congress barred further mining claims in the park in 1908, and the remaining claims were bought back over the following decades. Some work went on into the 1950s before mining proved too unprofitable. Because of owners' bankruptcy and back taxes, the Park Service could not buy the last claims in Glacier Basin until 1984. By then rockslides, cave-ins and snow had destroyed all the buildings and mine shafts. Hikers can still see what is left.

Rusty machinery and building remains from the mining days in Glacier Basin, along the White River, October 1975. Photo: NPS/L. Lane.

Roads and a master plan

The State of Washington began building State Highway 5, soon renamed 410, in 1916 and finished it in 1931. It gave much better access to the park's northeast side and made possible a ranger station and a campground on the White River.

Construction of the Sunrise Road from White River at Sunrise Point. Photo: NPS.

Park Service planners and local businessmen designing the park's future decided to create an alternative to Paradise at Yakima Park, later renamed Sunrise. The 1926 Master Plan pictured a road up from the White River campground to the meadows at Sunrise, with more campgrounds, cabins and a great lodge. The road was finished in 1931, and work began on a ranger building, three campgrounds, rental cabins and the first part of the lodge.

In the 1930s, Civilian Conservation Corps camps at White River and elsewhere in the park did landscaping, trail building and some construction. Lack of money during the Depression and World War II slowed the rangers' blockhouses, and with fewer visitors the Rainier National Park Company sold the rental cabins to the Defense Department for worker housing near defense plants. The lodge was never finished; only the part that was built became the Sunrise Day Lodge.

A light dusting of snow at Sunrise with the first blockhouse, the Day Lodge and the rental cabins. Photo: NPS.

Healing the meadows

After World War II, visitors and rangers slowly came to see the damage overuse was doing to the subalpine meadows. It took decades of natural growth and replanting to erase the scars of the cabins and roads. The Sunrise campgrounds closed over the years, their buildings were removed, and the ground was replanted. Some traces can still be seen behind the Day Lodge and in the picnic area.

The 1926 plan was never fully carried out, but other development followed. Because the two areas are isolated from the rest of the park, each has its own water, power and septic systems, started up each summer and winterized each autumn and upgraded over the years to be sustainable and efficient. The buildings, now considered historic, have been rehabilitated to withstand heavy snow. Connected to the rest of the park only by the road, Sunrise and White River spend almost seven months of winter asleep until the plows open the road in June.

Wildflowers bloom in a subalpine meadow at Sunrise. Photo: NPS/P. Wold.

Few artifacts remain, and the article asks anyone who finds one to leave it in place so others can learn from it later.

Sources

• National Park Service, Mount Rainier National Park, White River and Sunrise: the captivating northeast corner of Mount Rainier National Park; a photograph of a child left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.