A neighborhood where winter recreation is king

By GORDY HOLT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

In his cockpit between two giant tractor treads, Leif Botkin had been up and down the ski slopes of Snoqualmie Summit since 10 p.m.

"I'm wired," he says. "I feel like I've been driving a video game all night."

One in a fleet of $200,000 snow-packing tractors, Botkin's machine had helped to reduce more than four feet of new snow into a surface almost as smooth and nearly as compact as the counter at Webb's Bar and Grill, down in the lodge.

Botkin, 27, is a rookie on the snow-packing circuit, and this had been his baptismal night. And by 10 a.m., he is still sky high.

Welcome to a neighborhood where winter recreation is king and the only daffodils you'll chance to see by mid-June will have come from QFC.

Botkin has moved to a stool at the Denny Lodge bar a mile north of the summit in the Alpental Valley, where he's attacking a hamburger as though it might flee.

He is among fewer than 150 people who call Snoqualmie Pass home and mean it. He not only works here, he lives here. His parents once owned a home in the Alpental Valley, and he describes the place as "still like family."

"This is where I grew up," he says.

In the wee small hours of Botkin's night on the packing crew, the mercury had dipped below the 10-degree mark, but daylight had brought a rare dose of sunshine and blue sky. The temperature is holding well below freezing and the air is crisp. It's a day to keep your mittens on, and it's a Friday.

No crowds!

Botkin would not participate in the fun this day, however. He would let his burger settle, then head for the sack in a house he and his wife, Rachel, rent on nearby Yellowstone Trail Road.

"We call it the slums of Snoqualmie Pass," he says. His little joke. The three dozen cabins there are mostly small and modest, no match for the Tyrolean-style trophy homes that took shape in the Alpental Valley 30 years ago.

Few changes have occurred here since 1967 when a group of Tacoma investors, including soon-to-be Gov. Booth Gardner, stormed the timbered gulch to carve out what would become the state's last major ski area.

Alpental's arrival added a fourth destination to the trio of Snoqualmie Pass weekend resorts: Snoqualmie Summit, Ski Acres and Hyak.

But as the millennium nears, it takes a pretty healthy imagination to pin the label "neighborhood" on this 26-square-mile region. It straddles the Kittitas-King county line on the crest of the Cascades, shares two school districts and is divvied up between ski-area owners, individual property owners, a timber company (Plum Creek) and public land (administered by the U.S. Forest Service).

The area, however, is maturing. A comprehensive community plan has been created by those who live and work here, a sewer and water system has been in the ground for 16 years, and Kittitas County planners, who oversee the area, refer to the place as an "urban planning node."

The sewage-treatment system is flagged as the key to future development. The system ties together all four ski areas, their associated neighborhoods and the area's commercial strip, which includes the Family Pancake House, a BP service station and a traveler's rest stop old-timers still refer to as "the 40 holer."

The 86-page comprehensive plan, approved by the Kittitas County Commission in 1996, lays out a general framework for a cluster of resort villages with housing units for about 4,000 people, half of whom might choose to live here some day.

On the rural side, there is an alpine forest that rivals almost anything in a national park, but also there are clearcuts, the skinned ski slopes of the Summit and Ski Acres, and, oh, that weekend traffic!