A Refuge For Displaced Loggers?

Skamania Lodge, billed as an antidote to crippling timber-industry unemployment when it was built three years ago, is planning to expand.

The 195-room hotel is “literally full in the summer,” said Ian Muirden, Skamania Lodge general manager, and had an average occupancy rate of 77 percent this year.

The expansion project, expected to cost about $2 million, will add 20 to 30 rooms. Construction is tentatively planned to begin next year.

Skamania County lent its developer, Salishan Lodge Inc., $10 million in 1992 to complete the $25 million lodge complex. The county, its economy crippled by timber industry cutbacks, hoped the investment would ease the local jobless rate, then 26 percent.

The lodge - employing 209 full- and part-time permanent workers and 339 summer employees - is Skamania County’s largest private employer with a 1994 payroll of $4.8 million. County unemployment in September was 7 percent.