Santa had to step through slush and hop over puddles to reach the small crowd waiting for him at the holiday-themed village in downtown Leavenworth, Wash., late last week. Business in “Christmastown” was finally approaching normal, albeit soggily, after two weeks of downpours, high winds and power outages.
Leavenworth and the rest of the Pacific Northwest might have dodged the worst of back-to-back storms that dumped more than a foot of rain west of the Cascade Mountains. A man who drove past road-closed signs and into a flooded ditch outside Snohomish, Wash., was the only confirmed death.
But the climate-driven deluges took a chunk out of Christmastown’s busiest season, a brutal, costly reminder that the residents of the nation’s Northwest corner no longer know what nature will bring next and must adapt.
“Now it’s just so uncertain and more volatile,” said Erika Andersen Bowie, whose family owns the Leavenworth Reindeer Farm, where tourists can commune with a herd of 47 caribou. “More rain, more smoke, more snow. More chaos.”
People in this region are accustomed to rough weather and proud of their ability to handle the darker, wetter times of year. You can tell newcomers, the joke goes, because they’re the ones who use umbrellas.
But in their warnings over the past two weeks, state leaders warned Washingtonians off that bravado. Emergency crews had to perform more than 600 water rescues across the region.
“You may think you know what this is,” Washington’s governor, Bob Ferguson, said during a news conference. “This is much worse.”
There’s rain, and then there are the pummeling “atmospheric rivers” that swept across the Northwest over the last two weeks. Back-to-back storms are not unusual, but these were notably strong and warm systems, pulling in long, narrow plumes of moisture that stretched all the way from the tropics and across the Pacific Ocean.
When these plumes hit the Cascade Mountains, they’re wrung out like wet sponges, releasing heavy rain that slides down the slopes, particularly on the west side. All of that water flows into the valleys and rivers that run into Puget Sound. The recent systems brought more rain than snow, meaning the rivers received even more water than they would have with a colder storm.
As the planet warms, state climatologists expect temperatures will continue to rise and the snowpack will shrink in the Cascade Mountains of Washington. Karin Bumbaco, deputy state climatologist, said the kind of atmospheric rivers that struck earlier this month would become more common.
Beyond forcing residents to think more about their personal safety, the increasing volatility of Pacific Northwest weather means business owners have to account for more uncertainty in their long-term planning. Communities like Leavenworth that rely on seasonal activities to drive their economy will have to rethink their calendars.
“It was smoky all through September and sort of impacted our Oktoberfest. Now this,” said Kevin Rieke, who owns the Wood Shop, which specializes in wooden toys, and the Hat Shop, which sells, well, hats. “It’s all confusing.”
Leavenworth sits about two hours east of Seattle along the Wenatchee River, in a lush mountain region popular for hunting, fishing and hiking. The small city began in the 1800s as a rail and logging hub, then nearly died in the middle of the 20th century, when the Great Northern Railway moved its operations down the valley to nearby Wenatchee and logging declined.
In the early 1960s, desperate civic leaders decided to turn Leavenworth into a Bavarian-themed, Alpine-in-spirit-if-not-location village. They remodeled existing buildings and crafted new land-use laws that required every business — even major national chains like McDonald’s and Starbucks — to incorporate Bavarian fonts and themes.
It worked. Each year, Leavenworth draws 3 million visitors to tour the country’s largest collection of nutcrackers, listen to sidewalk carolers and revel in a village that feels like a Hallmark holiday movie.
“People come here and can’t even explain why they like it,” said Mr. Rieke, whose family has been in the toy and hat business since the mid-1970s and who, like many downtown business owners, fully embraces the town’s aesthetic.
Last week, he greeted customers while wearing traditional Bavarian tracht: a green wool jacket, embroidered leather lederhosen and a green felt hat topped with a feather. He was holding — and occasionally venturing outside to play — an alphorn, a 12-foot-long wind instrument with a rich, deep tone that sounds like the offspring of a French horn and an oboe.
“We’re getting more Bavarian than Bavaria,” said Mr. Rieke, who, like many business leaders here, visits Europe every year or so to meet with suppliers and get inspiration for future city events. “We know what makes this place magical.”
Now the town that reinvented itself to survive the decline of the logging industry faces a different kind of challenge.
“We have been told to expect climate change and weather changes to make things harder, to make things less predictable,” Mayor Carl Florea said. “This is our first extreme example.”
Downtown Leavenworth sits above the Wenatchee River, so the tourist district avoided the worst of the flooding. But storms knocked out power for three days, and heavy winds and rain left streets and parking lots cluttered with downed branches and sludge. A winter wonderland it was not.
“What’s worrisome is that this one impacted us much faster than most winter storms,” said Jessica Stoller, who oversees marketing for the Leavenworth Chamber of Commerce and had the skylights in her kitchen ripped out by wind. “We’re used to extreme weather you can prepare for.”
Many businesses in Leavenworth do 40 percent of their annual sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so being closed for even a few days in that window is devastating. At the Leavenworth Reindeer Farm just outside town, the caribou made it through safely, but Ms. Bowie estimated that her family’s business suffered $70,000 in damage and refunded $170,000 in ticket sales.
That’s on top of the losses that local businesses suffered over the past two years, when wildfires filled the air around Leavenworth with smoke as they prepared for Oktoberfest. And no one in town is quite sure how much of a financial hit they’ll take from the closure of U.S. Highway 2, one of the easiest and most scenic ways for people in the Seattle area to reach Leavenworth. A 49-mile stretch of the highway could be closed for months because of storm damage, including mudslides and washouts.
Most years, 75 percent of visitors come from the Puget Sound region, according to the Leavenworth Chamber of Commerce.
“We’ve never done any real marketing or reaching out, but now we’re looking at reaching out more to our eastern neighbors,” Ms. Bowie said. “Who wants to come visit Leavenworth from Idaho? We’re ready for you.”
Across the Northwest, a future of drier summers, wetter winters and wildfire seasons that start earlier and stretch longer is forcing adaptation. In Leavenworth, that means working harder to become a year-round tourism attraction, and maybe finding Santa an umbrella.
“It’s going to change our reality,” Mr. Florea said. “Part of being Christmastown U.S.A. is having cold winter weather — having a blanket of snow that the light bounces off, giving people the experience of sliding down hills and that sort of thing. We definitely won’t be doing that in the near future.”
Amy Graff is a Times reporter covering weather, wildfires and earthquakes.
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