Maple Valley Tutors Come To You

Sometimes, opportunity comes knocking, and other times, it presents itself through luck and circumstance. But it takes a tutored mind to recognize the possibilities.

That’s how it was for musician Kane Gaffney in the 1920s when he played an outdoor concert at Lake Wilderness near the town of Maple Valley, Washington. Gaffney saw a beautiful property on the water, and realized it could be a premier destination bringing in carloads of tourists.

In 1925, Kane and his brother Tom founded Gaffney’s Resort, seeing the opportunity to establish a vacation getaway spot that would attract tourists from Seattle and beyond.

Gaffney’s Resort, on 110-plus acres, eventually would include a lodge and rustic cabins in addition to water slides, a bowling alley, a dance hall, a roller rink and a restaurant, and over time expanded to include a nine-hole golf course and even an air strip.

At the peak of its popularity, some 9,000 visitors a day flocked there to enjoy swimming and boating in the lake as well as other amenities. The resort continued to be an attraction through the 1940s despite wartime gas rationing, when visitors arrived by bus to attend weekend dances.

It seemed as though there was little chance of failure, especially after plans for a new highway linking the area to Seattle and Tacoma were announced. And so the Gaffneys invested in a new 20,000-square-foot lodge and conference center, providing dramatic views of Lake Wilderness from a convention hall that could seat 600 people. It was lauded as an example of the Pacific Northwest regional style of modern architecture, with large windows, concrete posts and use of regional materials, such as hand-split cedar from local forests.

One of the most stunning features of Lake Wilderness Lodge was its three-story central column, carved as a totem pole reflecting Northwest Native American traditions and embedded in the center of a spiral staircase. Artist Dudley Carter carved the column from a 35-foot cedar trunk that was 5 feet in diameter at the base.

Although some 8,000 people attended the lodge’s grand opening in 1950, the resort’s popularity began to decline through the next decade, and in the mid-1960s, King County purchased the property as a measure to preserve open space, renaming it Lake Wilderness Park. After a variety of proposals for use of the lodge, it was finally retained and renovated by the county and operated as a community center.

In 2003, ownership of Lake Wilderness Park and the lodge was transferred to the recently incorporated city of Maple Valley, which continues to oversee and operate it as a recreation area. The lodge remains a popular venue for weddings and other events, and the park also includes a swimming beach, grass fields, and is the site of the annual Maple Valley Days parade each June.

Just as the Gaffneys saw the possibilities in a lovely spot beside a lake, Maple Valley tutors can help students recognize the possibilities of their own futures by working with them to achieve academic excellence from elementary school through college.