OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK — The Enchanted Valley chalet has been settled into its temporary new home, well away from the East Fork Quinault River’s crumbling banks.
The historic chalet, built in the early 1930s, has been moved about 100 feet away from the river’s eroded edge, said Rainey McKenna, Olympic National Park spokeswoman.
“We are very pleased to know that the chalet is now further from the river,” said Sarah Creachbaum, park superintendent.The $124,000 move was finished Friday after two weeks of painstaking work by employees of Monroe House Moving of Carlsborg, which used hydraulic jacks to push the two-story wooden structure on metal rails to its new location.
The river had undercut the structure by 8 feet.
Park officials decided to move the chalet because of possible environmental harm to the river if the structure fell into it, Barb Maynes, also a park spokeswoman, has said.
“We’re protecting the river, not necessarily saving the chalet,” Maynes said earlier this month.
A study to determine the final location and the future of the chalet will begin within the next year, and may take one or two years to complete, McKenna said.
Options could include finding a new spot for the structure, taking out sections, or removing it, she said.
A planning and environmental analysis, with public comment, will be completed before any decision can be made, she said.
Work to temporarily relocate the chalet began Sept. 1.
The chalet, 13 miles from the nearest road, is located within a wilderness area designated in 1988.
That reduced the options for how the building could be moved and what work was possible.
The equipment was moved into the roadless wilderness by pack mules and by helicopter.
Once the move was completed, the building was lowered onto cribbing towers — a temporary wooden foundation — and secured, McKenna said.
The building will remain closed to the public while in its current temporary location, she said.
The chalet was constructed by Quinault Valley residents beginning in 1930 and completed in 1931 prior to the establishment of Olympic National Park in 1938.
It served for several decades as a backcountry lodge and more recently as a wilderness ranger station and emergency shelter.
It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.
Migration of the East Fork Quinault’s channel is common in the loose, unconsolidated soils of Enchanted Valley, park officials said.
In a 2005 report, National Park Service geomorphologist Paul Kennard concluded that the channel would “shift catastrophically” within five years.
Storms, fallen trees, rockslides — all parts of the constant process of erosion — can cause the river to shift and carve a new channel.
Photos shared by park visitors in early January showed that the main channel of the East Fork Quinault River had migrated to within 18 inches of the structure.
By March, the park reported that the winter waters had undermined the chalet’s foundations and was threatening to drop the historical chalet into the water.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arwyn.rice@peninsuladailynews.com.
See a time-lapse video, courtesy of the National Park Service, that shows the chalet’s move here.
Another time-lapse view of the chalet’s move, again courtesy of the National Park Service.
