Paradise Historic District

The Paradise Historic District sits at roughly 5,400 feet elevation in the subalpine zone of Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, and encompasses six early-twentieth-century structures built to serve the park's first generations of visitors. Its centerpiece, the Paradise Inn, was constructed in 1917 from locally felled Alaska cedar in a rustic style deliberately designed to harmonize with the surrounding mountain landscape — it was named a National Historic Landmark in 1991. The district reflects the early National Park Service philosophy of blending visitor infrastructure seamlessly into wilderness settings. Paradise is also one of the snowiest inhabited places in the United States, regularly receiving over 50 feet of snowfall per season. Today the district offers an almost unchanged ensemble of early park-era architecture, surrounded by wildflower meadows in summer and extensive snowshoeing terrain in winter.