Snowmobile club opens new warming shelter on St. Helens

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As cars converged on the south side of Mount St. Helens on the Saturday before Christmas, people hustled across the snowy parking lot toward an inviting structure nearby. 

Inside the big cabin-style building, a wood-burning stove crackled, a Christmas tree glowed in the corner and parents exchanged warm hugs and greetings as children scampered about. A full spread of food beckoned at one of the tables, and paper chains of red and green stretched across the ceiling.

Looking at the festive scene, it was hard to imagine the building had been an empty shell just a few months before — and didn’t exist at all just a few months before that. For almost eight years, this spot at the Marble Mountain Sno-Park was empty, after the cabin that had stood there for decades burned to the ground in 2011.

The Christmas party, hosted by the Mount St. Helens Trac Riders, was also a celebration of the new warming shelter — and the snowmobile club deserves much of the credit for getting it rebuilt.

“Every Saturday night we have a potluck in here, and we’ll be here until midnight, 1 in the morning playing games,” said Larry Lamkin, president of the Trac Riders. “When the warming shelter wasn’t here, we’d all be isolated in our RVs or not here because there’s no meeting place. It almost brings tears to my eyes, being able to sit here and watch this. Now we have a place we can call home.”

Lamkin’s club, made up of about 60 families, is more than just a collection of people who like to fly up the mountain on their snowmobiles. It’s an intergenerational web of friendships, a tight-knit group that meets up even when there’s no snow on the ground.

“It turned out to be more a family than a snowmobile club,” said Bob Lynn, who joined the group three years ago when he moved to the area from North Carolina. “They’re the kindest people I’ve ever met. In three years, I’ve become closer to some of these people than people I’ve known for many years.” 

The club, members say, is successful because it’s for everyone. Families can meet up at the mountain, with some setting off for the adventure of the high slopes and others looping around the groomed trails at lower elevation. 

What makes it all possible is the warming shelter. It’s a place for people to gather as they wait for stragglers to arrive, then meet back up for lunch. Parents can bring kids inside to warm up when they start to shiver. And it gives everyone a place to hang out after a long day on the mountain, to play games and trade tall tales of their day. 

“When the (original) shelter burned, the club grew apart,” said Mike Ainslie, a club member who’s also a district representative for the Washington State Snowmobile Association. “The shelter’s a good BS place. It’s a good place to come in and have a fire after you’ve been out snowmobiling all day. When there’s no place to do that, you just drive home. … Now, it feels like home again.”

While seeing the club gathered in the new shelter was poignant for many, it was doubly rewarding because of the effort it had taken to get there. According to Lamkin, club members started fundraising for a new shelter the very day the last one burned down. The years after that brought a lot of “heartache and frustration,” he said, as members realized it was going to be an ordeal to replace their shelter.



The club secured grants and donations, volunteered labor and lined up local companies who donated equipment and time. For years, though, the project was stalled, hung up somewhere in the U.S. Forest Service bureaucracy. Many believed the shelter would never get rebuilt.

“I’ve never worked so hard for anything in my life,” Ainslie said. 

In February, Lamkin emailed Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Battle Ground, who got behind the project and “lit a fire under the Forest Service.” Shari Hildreth, Herrera Beutler’s district director, was a guest of the club Saturday, a recognition of her role in getting the shelter built.

Meanwhile, the club found an ally in Tracy Calizon, a community engagement officer with the Forest Service. When told some of the club’s grants would expire if the club wasn’t able to use them soon, she pledged that they would get to use all the money they had brought in. 

“Tracy has been our saving grace,” Ainslie said.

Calizon, who was also a guest of the Trac Riders at the party, gave all the credit to the club.

“The amount of work these guys have put into this place blows me away,” she said. “To see everybody being able to actually come in and relax — it’s been a long time coming for these guys, and they’ve earned it.”

The Trac Riders contributed much of the funding that got the shelter built, as well as much of the volunteer labor that has turned it into a finished structure. Recent Facebook posts on the group’s page include calls for volunteers to install doors and benches, finish walls, work on a generator and stock the wood room with firewood. Everybody seems to have pitched in — the shelter bore no evidence of the last-minute scramble it took to get it ready for winter.

The club won’t be the only group to benefit from the shelter. It will be open to hikers, climbers, cross-country skiers and snowshoers, all of whom use the Sno-Park regularly during the year. Just a few weeks ago, first responders used the warming shelter as a command center to stage a successful rescue for a missing hiker. Calizon said the shelter will provide a safe place for those who need to retreat from winter conditions, and a gathering point no matter the weather.

“It’s the heart of winter recreation for the south side of Mount St. Helens,” she said.