Deal preserves grand old trees along highway leading to Mount Rainier park entrance

Phil Freeman was feeling good Sunday knowing that the forest that protects both the Mount Rainier experience and his Copper Creek Restaurant in Ashford will be preserved.

“It’s just hugely important,” he said, referring to the half-mile section of highway that runs past his restaurant on the way to the Nisqually entrance to Mount Rainier National Park. “It’s one of the best known park entrances in the world.”

He was reacting to news that the Nisqually Land Trust has bought the 142-acre Allen Estate near the park entrance from the estate’s California owners for $780,000. The estate was home to Grenville Allen, the park’s superintendent from 1903-1910.

The purchase ends the threat that the estate’s 80- to 125-year-old trees would be logged. The trees create a forested hallway alongside Highway 706 east from Kiernahan Road to just past Copper Creek.

Freeman is among the many residents who joined with the Nisqually Headwater Coalition to oppose the logging plan when it surfaced in 2005. The coalition formed to preserve timbered lands in the Upper Nisqually River Valley along the highway leading to the park. The entryway outside the park is considered vital to the tourist industry.

“It enhances the visitor’s experience,” Freeman said. “Logging the trees would have been disastrous to our community.

“I couldn’t be happier.”

The old-growth trees, he said, also protect his business. They serve as a natural barrier from the southwest winds that can roar through the area and topple smaller trees.

Park Superintendent Dave Uberuaga was equally pleased with the purchase.

“I think we took for granted what we had up there,” he said of the estate and its timberland. “It helped preserve the rural atmosphere and transfer to the park.”

The purchase is part of the Land Trust’s Mount Rainier Gateway Initiative, which calls for preserving 4,500 acres of timberlands between the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and the Elbe Hills and Tahoma state forests.

The estate was bought with a federal land-acquisition grant through the Washington Department of Natural Resources.

“This is a keystone property for the Mount Rainier Gateway,” Joe Kane, executive director of the Land Trust, said in a news release announcing the sale late last week. “It has a rare combination of ecological, cultural and economic values.”

Besides the forest, the estate contains wetlands and six wildlife species identified by the state for protection. They include the spotted owl and the marbled murrelet, both listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Kane said the Land Trust stepped in to find a “way out of the logging impasse.”

A key to the success of the negotiations, he explained, was paying the owners full value for their property.

“This is a wonderful solution to a difficult situation,” Chrissie Breedlove, an heir to the estate, said in the same news release. “We couldn’t be more pleased. This is exactly what our grandparents would have wanted.”

To commemorate the preservation of the Grenville Allen Memorial Forest, Freeman’s wife, Catharine Gallagher, designed a sign that the coalition will install along the highway.

Headwaters Coalition chair Judy Scavone wrote in a newsletter sent to members: “The Ashford community is indebted to all our partners for engineering this most elegant solution.”