Peak-priced views are great ... when they're not blocked by snow

By GORDY HOLT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Ingrid Simonson can see it all from her back deck halfway up an Alpental Valley road called Ober Strasse. The view opens north into the basin between 5,520-foot Denny Mountain and the precipitous, rocky flanks of 5,168-foot Guye Peak. In the opposite direction, you have to look down to find the slot that contains Interstate 90 and the 3,127-foot summit of Snoqualmie Pass.

To take it all in at once would put a cramp in the neck of most flatlanders, a category Simonson doesn't fit.

A former ski racer and coach of national rank, and a schoolteacher with advanced degrees, Simonson has run the Alpental Ski School for the past 18 years and has lived on the mountain for most of that time.

She sold a nearby condo to buy the Ober Strasse house two years ago, only to face a 620-inch record snowfall in the winter of 1996-97. It was almost too much.

To reduce the load pressing sideways on her roof she brought in a friend with a backhoe to carve away the pack. She also wielded a shovel and tunneled past her windows to keep them from breaking.

Simonson survived, but as much with humor as with a schoolteacher's grit.

"I often thought I should have stayed in my condo and let it all be someone else's responsibility," Simonson says. "But I guess I really wouldn't change anything. I love this place."

At Summit East (Hyak), nearly two miles into Kittitas County, a love of mountain living began six years ago for Patrick and Barbara Manley. As newlyweds, they bought a house halfway up a mountain at Hyak Estates.

Unlike Simonson, the Manleys don't work here. They commute daily to jobs in Renton and Kent. Barbara is a production artist for Eagle Hardware in Renton. Patrick is production manager for a print shop in Kent. The commute takes about an hour, "and I can usually get home faster than if I lived in Federal Way," he says.

It would figure that both Manleys ski. He is better than she, he says.

Patrick Manley, 37, "got real good real quick" while in his early 20s at a ski resort near Fresno, Calif. He once dreamed of racing for Olympic glory. Now he competes at the age-group master's level. Of her skiing ability, Barbara Manley says, "I'm an advanced intermediate -- I think."

The standard of living at Hyak improved markedly last year after a vote by the neighbors to pave their rough dirt road, and Kittitas County agreed to plow it.

"We usually had to park and hike, a quarter-mile, maybe," Barbara Manley says. "We'd carry up our groceries."

The reverse was easier, if no less expressive. "We put our garbage on a blue tarp and dragged it down to the vehicle," says her husband.

"To be honest," he says, "I kind of miss it. It's almost like Bellevue now."

The Manleys based their housing decision in part on a hunch that something big was about to pop at the summit.

"I had an inkling all along that Ski Lifts Inc. would be sold," Patrick Manley says. "But I'd also read that ski-area homes were a pretty good investment."

Real estate records are sketchy because there is no multiple listing system for the area. But on the King County side, Snoqualmie Pass prices reflect the housing market east of Lake Washington.

The six sales that closed in 1997 averaged $208,000, with a low of $141,750, a high of $300,000 and an assessment average of $211,600, says Tony Vedrich, a John L. Scott broker on Mercer Island.