Paradise Inn, Built From Silver Cedar
Near Ashford, Washington
High on the mountain's south flank, in a meadow so beautiful it was simply named Paradise, stands one of the great rustic lodges of the American West. Paradise Inn opened its doors on the first of July, nineteen seventeen, as one of the Pacific Northwest's first high elevation mountain resorts. It cost somewhere between ninety and one hundred thousand dollars to build, a fortune at the time.
The story of its timber is remarkable. Three decades before construction, a forest fire had swept through a stand of Alaska yellow cedar, killing the trees and stripping their limbs. Left standing, they weathered to a soft silver gray.
Builders harvested this ghostly dead cedar and turned it into the towering pillars and exposed beams that still frame the great lobby. A German carpenter named Hans Fraehnke crafted the finest details by hand, including a fourteen foot grandfather clock, a rustic piano, and two enormous tables each weighing about fifteen hundred pounds. In nineteen forty five, President Harry Truman sat down at that very piano and played.
Designed in the National Park rustic style sometimes called parkitecture, Paradise Inn was built to belong to its mountain, and after more than a century, it still does.
