A Brief History of Mount Rainier National Park

Visitors driving to Paradise, Mount Rainier National Park, photo courtesy National Park Service

The advent of automobiles increased the accessibility of the park but also created new challenges. The Nisqually Entrance Road, also called Government Road, was the first road constructed in the park beginning in 1904. The road was planned by a landscape architect to artfully move visitors through the mountainous landscape to Longmire and then to Paradise. Mount Rainier was the first national park to allow personal vehicles and to collect entrance fees in 1907. The road to Paradise Park was finished in 1911, making travel to the mountain even easier. Development at the park grew at a torrid and often chaotic pace. Visitation ballooned from 1,786 in 1906 to 34,814 nine years later.

During the Great Depression, visitation initially fell. President Roosevelt’s "New Deal" brought new funding to Mount Rainier. Between 1933-1940, over 1,000 men from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) came each summer to work on trail construction, campground improvement, and forest fire protection. A boundary expansion in 1931 pushed the park’s boundary east to the Cascade Range, bringing the Ohanapecosh area within the park boundaries.

Funding and visitation plummeted during World War II, though the park did find new use as a training ground for the army’s new mountain divisions. After World War II, the focus of the park shifted toward managing the extreme increase in visitor use.