The Linger Longer Lodge

When I was 11 years old, my Dad and Stepmother spent the summer in Seattle and I stayed with them for six weeks.  I arrived shortly after my sister Ann was born, so they decided that it would be a good idea for Dad and I to take a week together and do a road trip.  This was the only time the two of us ever spent any time alone together.  The ostensible purpose was so that I wouldn't feel so jealous of my new sister, but in retrospect I think Dad was happy to have an excuse to get away and get a good night's sleep for a week.  In any event, we wound up on the Olympic Peninsula, and driving through the town of Quilcene we discovered the Linger Longer Lodge.  Although we only intended to spend the night before continuing on into Olympic National Park, the lodge turned out to be true to its name and we lingered there for the entire week.  We used it as a base from which to visit various attractions in the park.  So on this trip,  I thought it would be interesting to go back down memory lane and revisit the LLL.   More on this later.

After visiting with most of my Portland relatives (sister Ellen, cousins Neil and Steve) for a few days, Cherie and I got a late start out of the Jantzen Beach RV resort and headed north to Olympic National Park, our next destination.  When I was a kid, Jantzen Beach was THE big amusement park in Portland, so as we approached I was expecting to see the ferris wheel, roller coasters, and so forth.  Alas, all we found were Target, Bed Breakfast and Beyond, and the usual coterie of box stores.  It seems that shopping centers make more money than amusement parks.  As usual, economics trumps all.

But on with the narrative.  Due to our late start, we drove into the park,  passed beautiful Lake Crescent pictured above without stopping, and barely made it to Sol Duc Hot Springs to set up camp before nightfall.  But as it happened, we got a relatively secluded spot next to the river.  The next day we hiked up to the falls:

and then "took the waters" when we returned.  Sol Duc Lodge was built in 1912 at the height of the "hot springs fad" for lack of a better word, at a cost of over a half million dollars.  That sum corresponds to nearly $50 million in today's dollars.   It was huge, with 165 guest rooms, a three-story sanitorium with 100 beds, laboratory facilities, and various other outbuildings.  A sawmill was built at the site to supply lumber for all this construction.  The guests were driven 9 miles to the lodge from Lake Crescent aboard a fleet of Stanley Steamers, which if you've never hear of them, were famous steam-powered automobiles of the day.   The prevailing view at that time was that soaking in, and yes, drinking the hot sulfurous water would cure whatever ailed you.  Today there are big signs warning the guests NOT to drink the water.  But it's still OK to soak, and soak we did.

This is the perfect spot for a brief commercial break on the folly of health fads.  The problem here is not that people think health fads work, but rather that one person's fad is another persons's magical cure.  How to separate the fads from the magical cures?   The answer is simple:  there are no magical cures, people! The human body is a very complex organism which has evolved over millions of years to its present state, and is only recently beginning to be understood in any detail.  Yes, many conditions can now be cured.   Not by magic,  but by a long, difficult, painstaking process of discovery called science.  End of commercial.

In 1916, only four years after it opened, the Sol Duc Lodge burned to the ground.  Due to a defective chimney flue, the wooden roof caught fire.   As the story goes, the fire short-circuited the electric organ, which then proceeded to play Beethoven's Funeral March until silenced by the flames.  Today there's only a small gift shop and restaurant on the site, together with some housekeeping cabins and a campground.

The second day we drove back to Lake Crescent Lodge.  I had incorrectly remembered that the Linger Longer was located on Lake Crescent, and I thought that maybe only the name had changed.  Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case.   Stifling our disappointment, we hiked up to yet another falls:

The theme of lodge plus hiking trail to falls seems to be a recurrent one in Olympic National Park.  But in reality, the park is huge -- around 1,460 sq. mi. -- and consists mostly of wilderness accesible only by backpacking trails.  We barely scratched the surface on this trip.  It would have taken the better part of a week just to see what is accesible by road.

But what of the Linger Longer Lodge?  After we got back on the grid, I did some internet research.  It hadn't been on Lake Crescent after all, but in the town of Quilcene on Puget Sound.  And sadly, it had followed in the footsteps of the Sol Duc Lodge, burning to the ground on Halloween night in 1959.   Apparently the firefighters showed up in their Halloween costumes.  One can only imagine quite a sight.