The Trott’s Scavenger Inn of Mt. Baker Ski Area

In the northwest corner of the Mt. Baker Ski area back parking lot, there once lived a creature named Scavenger Inn whose belly and wings morphed and expanded according to its owners’ wishes. Like all of the Trott family’s pets, Trudy the Rat, Madeline the Goat, Tuktu, their hybrid wolf, and their many stray cats, Scavenger Inn was a member of the family.         

In 1935, four years after the Mt. Baker Lodge burned to the ground, Scavenger Inn came into this world along with several sheds, a heating plant, and a water pumping plant for the “Call of The Wild” film crew. The actors used Scavenger Inn as their dressing room. After the film crew departed, the shed became wild without much human contact. It began to slump.

Then, in 1939, Dr. Otto T. Trott, a refugee from the horrors of the Nazi party, made a deal with the U.S. Forest Service to exchange ski patrol services for the abandoned cabin. He tamed the two-level timber ceiling shed by repairing the slump with a wall of flying buttresses to keep it from sliding down hill. Like many of the humans and creatures he treated and healed, Scavenger Inn came alive in his hands.

Scavenger Inn became a refuge for the doctor. At the cabin, he could be himself and spend time in the North Cascades, just as he loved to do as a teenager in the Alps. Along with his friend, Virginia Hill (who later became a pilot for the Army during WWII, then an Alaskan bush pilot) and two other couples from Seattle, Dr. Trott initiated first aid training for the Mt. Baker Ski Area.

In 1946, he married his wife Ruth, who he met on Austin Pass when she broke her leg. The couple spent their weekends fixing up Scavenger Inn and ski patrolling. Soon after, the Trotts’ eldest daughter, Marlies, came into the world followed by the twins, Kaaren and Kristine, and Roxanne, then Renate. As the family grew, Scavenger Inn expanded its wings with extra rooms – some drafty and cold, others hot and stuffy. The doctor hung a swing from its timber rafters for the girls and their guests.

Every Friday evening, before the interstate highway existed, the growing Trott family drove from Seattle to visit their favorite place. Often arriving at midnight, the older girls broke trail through the snow and shoveled a path to Scavenger Inn. They hauled backpacks and sleds full of food, supplies and the younger sisters. While the oldest daughters and their parents made a snow staircase down to the door of the cabin, Renate, the youngest, waited in the middle of the blizzard with Marlies’ wolf-dog, Tuktu, who pulled her on a sled.

Once inside the inn, the family fed the basalt stone fireplace, lit the kerosene lanterns, and ignited the diesel generator for lights and hot water. As the frozen pipes thawed, they’d clean up the messes that the pine martens made and pulled out the gifts Dr. Trott had bought from Saint Vinny’s to decorate and care for their favorite pet. Because the cabin was happiest when it was full, strangers lost in the night, ski patrollers, ski area employees, and friends filled its belly with songs, jokes and stories.

On Saturday mornings, when the avalanche gun banged, Scavenger Inn recoiled and shook. The girls would tumble out of bed to eat breakfast, and don baggy wool pants, Army surplus anoraks, wool hats, leather gloves and square-toed leather boots. Then they strapped on their wooden skis with bear trap bindings to ride the rope tow beside Sunrise Lake.

Under their creature’s wings, the Trott girls grew up. With their father’s tutelage they climbed mountains, worked as ski instructors and ski patrollers, practiced Double Daffies, 360s, and mule kicks, winning ski competitions all along the way. While their mom patrolled, fixed up the house, and tended to them and their pets, Dr. Trott tended the community. When he wasn’t stitching up an injured skier, he offered vaccines and treatment to the local towns on his way up and down the mountain.

As the doctor and his wife aged and the girls moved on to different adventures, Scavenger Inn became lonely, longing for the songs and stories that once filled its belly. Dr. Trott tended the best he could, but in 1971, the Forest Service decided it was time to put Scavenger Inn down, long before Dr. Trott and his wife were ready to see their creature go. The Forest Service claimed that Trott hadn’t paid the $1/year lease they were owed, so they dismantled and bulldozed the cabin to expand the back parking lot for the Mt. Baker Ski Area. And all that is left are the Trott’s pictures, stories and dreams.

Today, if you stand in the back parking lot, above lower Bagley Lake, look around and imagine where Scavenger Inn once stood. Nearby, old Hollywood filmed the “Call of the Wild.” Go further back in time to 1922 when Charlie Bourn led his packs of horses and Bellingham businessmen to plan the Heather Meadows lodges. Now, imagine before the mid-1800s, Heather Meadows once had been home to bears, coyotes, blueberries, heather, mountain hemlock and subalpine firs. The only people who visited here were the Lummi and the Nooksack, who foraged for blueberries and searched for mountain goat hair for their blankets. Now all that is left of these people and their pets are the stories we pass down.   X

Thanks to Roxanne Corff, Renate Pinch, and Marlies Slostad for their pictures and stories. For more history about Dr. Otto Trott read “The Making of a Rescuer” by Nicholas Campbell Corff (2008).

For more history about the original lodges of Mount Baker read “The Grand Lady of Mount Baker” by Michael G. Impero (2015).