In the summer of 1885, a woman named Virinda Longmire rode a horse up into a high alpine meadow on the south side of Mount Rainier and found it covered in wildflowers, lupine and avalanche lilies and Indian paintbrush thick enough to color entire hillsides. She is said to have looked around and said this must be what paradise looks like. The name stuck. Eighty-six years later, in a winter nobody who lived through it forgot, that same meadow proved it could be something else entirely.
Paradise gets more snow, more reliably, than almost anywhere else on Earth where anyone bothers to measure it. In one specific winter, it got so much that it set a world record that stood for nearly three decades.
A Meadow Named for What It Looked Like, Once
James Longmire's family were among the first white settlers to explore Mount Rainier's southern slopes, and it was his daughter-in-law Virinda who gave Paradise its name during that 1885 visit. Her son Elcaine cut a rough trail up to the meadow that same era; by the early 1890s, Leonard Longmire and an employee named Henry Carter had improved it into a real foot and bridle path and were charging visitors fifty cents to use it. The first automobile reached Paradise in 1911, twelve years after Mount Rainier became the country's fifth national park.
Every one of those visitors came for the wildflowers. Almost none of them were thinking about what the same meadow does every winter, under snow deep enough to bury the trees the flowers grow beside.
Paradise Inn
Paradise Inn opened in 1916, built largely from Alaska cedar salvaged from a fire-killed forest nearby, and it still stands on the National Register of Historic Places. Decades of that same brutal Paradise snowpack eventually took a toll no log building was designed for: by the early 2000s, the inn needed a two-year, thirty-million-dollar renovation to make it earthquake-resistant and structurally sound, reopening to guests in 2008.
The building that survives today isn't quite the same wood that went up in 1916. It's a building that had to be rebuilt to keep surviving the same weather that made Paradise worth naming in the first place.
Time It Right
Wildflowers or snowshoe season, Paradise is a different place depending on the month. The trip planner builds around whichever one you're after.
Open the Trip PlannerThe Winter of 1971-72
Between the fall of 1971 and the following spring, Paradise recorded 1,122 inches of snowfall, 93.5 feet, a total that at the time stood as the greatest seasonal snowfall ever measured anywhere on Earth. The National Park Service still measures snow at Paradise every winter, one of the longest continuously recorded snowfall datasets at any single site in the country, and the range since then has been enormous: as little as 266 inches in the comparatively dry winter of 2014-15, and a maximum single-day snowpack depth of 367 inches recorded in March 1956.
- 1971-72 season total 1,122 IN (93.5 FT)
- Lowest season on record 266 IN (2014-15)
- Max snowpack depth 367 IN (MAR 1956)
What Finally Broke the Record
Paradise's 1,122-inch record held for twenty-seven years. It fell in the winter of 1998-99, when Mount Baker Ski Area, near the Canadian border in Washington's North Cascades, recorded 1,140 inches, eighteen inches more than Paradise had managed in 1972. Mount Baker holds the world record today. Paradise still holds the runner-up spot, and depending on the winter, it comes closer to reclaiming it than almost anywhere else that measures snow at all.
The wildflowers Virinda Longmire found in 1885 still come back every summer, on schedule, on the same slopes. They just spend most of the year first getting buried under numbers that would sound made up anywhere else in the country.
Facts and figures checked against NPS.gov's Paradise snowfall records and historical Paradise Inn materials, and published Mount Baker Ski Area snowfall records for the 1998-99 season.
A woman rode a horse into a meadow, saw wildflowers, and gave it a name that stuck for a hundred and forty years. The mountain kept its own schedule regardless: flowers in July, and, some winters, enough snow to bury the inn's first floor before spring gets anywhere close.