Lake Quinault Lodge: An elegant, rustic rain-forest getaway

It was raining so hard the swamp was overflowing.

We were hiking with umbrellas, which seemed like prudent self-defense when my wife, our daughter, her sixth-grade friend and I left the car at road's edge during a December deluge near Lake Quinault Lodge. Balancing bumbershoots like tightrope walkers, we edged around boot-sucking puddles where the trail was rapidly merging with surrounding marsh.

A squishy quarter-mile paid off as we clambered across a wooden bridge inches above a rain-pocked pool and got our first clear look at the base of the world's largest Sitka spruce.

This is what this place is about. It's a rain forest, and the Quinault Valley's average 140 inches of annual rainfall — almost four times what Seattle receives — grows monumental trees. Within a few miles of this spot stand five other record-holding conifers: Western red cedar, yellow cedar, Douglas fir, Western hemlock and mountain hemlock.

The spruce was a divine monster, its base the width of a two-car garage. The girls had never seen any living thing like it.

"Wow!" said my daughter, Lillian, her neck cranked back at full tilt. She turned to her friend with earnest purpose and said, "Come on. We need to measure how many steps it takes to circle it!"

As they clambered through tangled roots, loudly counting each stride — "Twenty-eight! Twenty-nine!" all the way to 50 — my wife, Barbara, the family historian, wildly recited the significance of a tree more than 1,000 years old.

"It was already huge when Christopher Columbus came to America! Touch this tree, it's living history!"

History and nature had been kind of a theme for our winter weekend at Lake Quinault Lodge, which at 77 years old is a bit of a relic itself. Our getaway turned out to be more back-to-nature than expected: A windstorm the morning of our arrival knocked out the electricity, which wasn't restored until long after we went to bed that night.

So a good bit of our visit had a feeling of old times, lit by candles, lanterns and firelight. (Fueled by gas, the restaurant kept cooking and a boiler kept supplying heat and hot water to the main lodge rooms.)

As it should be at a classic lodge in remote backwoods, the lobby's big brick fireplace was the wintertime focus — the meeting place, the knitting-in-front-of place, the reading place, the warming-up-after-a-stroll place. Staff fed the blaze with yardlong logs, which emitted the cinnamony perfume of wood smoke and cast a glow on wicker couches and chairs with plump cushions in teal, red and green.

One tabletop was a chessboard, equipped with oversize chess pieces. Shelves held dozens of jigsaw puzzles and board games for hours of do-nothing fun.

Sitting by the fire and sipping coffee, my eyes wandered to vintage stencil paintings of Indians, wolves, ducks and other wildlife on the overhead wooden beams. Through large, latticed windows, the lake was close beyond an open lawn edged by moss-draped firs and cedars. Wisps of fog rose like my coffee's steam from the distant forested hills of Olympic National Park, the same view that inspired President Franklin Roosevelt on a 1937 visit here, nine months before he signed a bill creating the park. This place was perfectly pleasant.

It's about the views

As we took a misty stroll on the lawn we looked above the shake-sided walls and shutter-edged windows to another piece of classic lodge design: the big weathervane, with a figure of an Indian brave shooting an arrow at a charging beast.

From the Roosevelt Room restaurant during lunch, the girls spied one of their favorite discoveries, the resort's resident rabbits hopping around the lawn.

"Oh, yes, they're always around — you can feed them bread and they'll eat out of your hand," our friendly waitress told them.

And that's how the girls spent much of their visit, feeding hot-dog buns from the store across the road to very damp bunnies (which they named Licorice, Fudge and Caramel, according to hue).

Except for our pilgrimage to the spruce, rain kept us close to the lodge, so we didn't walk many of the nearby nature trails and loop hikes, for which the lodge thoughtfully provides personalized walking sticks in each room (along with a plush version of their mascot banana slug, available for purchase in the gift shop).

But outdoor recreation isn't what brings most people here in winter. I asked Shannon Ernst of Shelton why she comes every winter with a group from her husband's office.

"The fireplace!" she said, sidling closer to it. "And that view — the mountains are so pretty."

"And the food is really good, and the staff is really nice and helpful," added a companion.

That held true for us after dinner. After dark, there wasn't enough light to read or play games by, and most of the lodge's guests hunkered around the fireplace trying to make the best of a challenging vacation moment. Fingers drummed. A baby cried. My wife and I needed a diversion.

The bar was dark, but a kindly older gentleman was going in and paused as I approached. Might we get a couple of liqueurs? "Of course," he smiled. "Are you in the lobby? I'll bring them."

It took a few minutes, but in the confusion and darkness he searched us out, presented our Bailey's Irish Cream and a bill to sign, then smiled and disappeared Cheshire-cat-like into the shadows.

The only thing a gracious management might have done more nicely would have been to tell the kind old barman to tear up the bill as a "come back another time" gesture.

Never mind. The fire crackled. The baby calmed. Rain played tom-tom on the windows. Ahh, that's better.

Brian J. Cantwell: 206-748-5724 or bcantwell@seattletimes.com