When winter descends on Mount Rainier National Park, an incredible average of 650 inches of snow falls along the mountainside.

It ebbs and flows across the landscape built up in drifts sculpted by prevailing winds and coating subalpine meadows into a thick blanket of white.

But even after the heaviest storm,

those with a keen eye may still spot the peak of a roof

and the edges of dormers cutting above the snow.

And as it melts in the spring,

it reveals one of the greatest lodges of the West,

the Paradise Inn.

The surrounding area, much like the in itself, is aptly named.

Sitting at 5,400 feet and settled in the shadow of Mount Rainier herself,

visitors find flourishing meadows in geothermal springs that seem to be of another world in Paradise.

Discovered in 1883 by early explorer James Longmire, Paradise would become a foundational

element of the hotel and health spa he'd developed 12 miles downhill at Longmire Springs.

From the beginning, visitors would willingly pay a fee to traverse the trail leading to the area.

And by the time Mount Rainier was designated as a national park in 1899,

a tent camp named Camp in the Clouds had already been hosting guests at Paradise for a few years.

But Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service,

knew that the first national parks would forever stand as a testament to the romanticism of the National Park Service, knew that the first national parks would forever stand as a testament

to the romanticism of the American wilderness that defined the early 20th century. More so,

the growing desire to protect those spaces, combined with developing environmental concerns

at Mount Rainier, presented a distinct opportunity in the Cascades. Under his influence,

Mount Rainier National Park would not be treated simply as a group of fragmented locations protected as a

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