As the Washington State Department of Transportation reopens the eastern route to Stevens Pass, small businesses on west side are still waiting on relief.
SKYKOMISH, Wash. — The parking lot at the Cascadia Inn, which should be packed with skiers on a December afternoon, sits mostly empty. Inside, Henry Sladek, the owner and mayor of this town of 160 residents, tends to just one occupied room on what would normally be a fully booked day during peak ski season.
Two weeks ago, a catastrophic atmospheric river washed out Highway 2, severing access to Stevens Pass ski resort and isolating a chain of small communities along Washington’s Cascade corridor. While the state announced Friday that the eastern approach to the resort will reopen this week, that relief extends no further west than Leavenworth — leaving businesses like Sladek’s stranded on the wrong side of the mountain.
“It’s been totally, totally quiet, totally dead,” Mr. Sladek said. “The highway is closed like four miles up the highway. So it’s basically a long dead end road.”
The damage to the region’s economy has been swift and devastating. Sladek estimates his hotel is operating at roughly 10% of normal capacity. The cafe attached to his inn, which typically serves seven or eight tables a day before the closure, has seen a slight uptick in recent days, but only because a handful of people drove from as far as Seattle and Bellingham after hearing about the community’s plight.
“We had some people coming from Monroe saying they just wanted to help us out and get a burger,” Sladek said. “I’m super thankful for all of our local support.”
However, such gestures, while meaningful, have done little to offset the financial hemorrhaging.
Sladek says about 80 to 90% of Skykomish’s revenue comes from tourism. The ski season and the holiday period, from mid-December through January, account for a significant amount of the income. Now, with those crucial weeks slipping away, businesses face an impossible calculus: how to survive months of lost revenue.
“Being self-employed, you always have to prepare. You have to save your summer peanuts for winter,” said Jen Cashman Cox, owner of Zeke’s Drive In in Gold Bar. Most of her customers Sunday were locals.
“We’ll overcome this,” she said.
While Gov. Bob Ferguson announced Friday that the eastern side of Highway 2 would open with limited pilot car service this week, allowing skiers from Leavenworth to reach Stevens Pass, the western communities remain cut off. The reopening requires travelers to drive an extra hour or more on circuitous detours, making it useless for day trip travelers.
For the west side, hope rests on a bridge inspection. At milepost 54, just outside Skykomish, a critical span sustained significant damage, buried under debris. The state has been clearing the wreckage for weeks, but the full extent of the damage remains unknown.
The governor is scheduled to visit Skykomish on Tuesday morning to meet with community leaders and impacted businesses. He is expected to announce a timeline — or at least provide a more definitive assessment — of when Highway 2’s western approach might reopen. State officials have warned that repairs could take weeks, or possibly months, depending on what the bridge inspections reveal.
For Mr. Sladek and other business owners, Tuesday’s announcement cannot come soon enough. The holiday period, which should be the year’s most lucrative weeks, is slipping away — and those lost days cannot be recovered once they pass.
The uncertainty itself has become a kind of torture for businesses. Decisions about staffing, hours and inventory require knowing whether the closure will last two weeks or two months. Without answers, business owners are forced into worst-case-scenario planning.
“The uncertainty is the difficult thing for all of the businesses here,” Sladek said.
