A landslide west of Mount Rainier's northwestern corner claimed a car. Driver got out with minor injuries/East Pierce Firefighters

Continuing bouts of rain and snow are likely to keep Mount Rainier National Park closed to the visiting public for a while yet as landslides and flooding have hemmed in the park.

“We’re probably going to get a pretty decent rainfall this weekend," Tracy Swartout, the park's deputy superintendent, said Monday afternoon with an eye on the forecast. “All the entrances in the park are closed because of landslides outside the park, basically.”

Heavy rains and snowmelt during the weekend, and saturated soils, spawned the natural disaster. Mudslides left some roads coated in mud, muck, and timber, undercut other roads, and in one case outside Mount Rainier's northwest corner "ate a car."

But no fatalities or major injuries were reported, and for the most part the park seemed largely intact; "seemed" being the operative word, as officials were waiting Monday evening for a status report from a crew that flew a helicopter over the park looking for damage.

The biggest problem seemed to be outside the park's southwestern entrance, Nisqually, where two slides had covered the road.

“State Route 706 that comes into the park is blocked by two pretty big, pretty active slides," said Swartout. “The state is waiting for them to stabilize, and so they’ll be back out on Thursday. But until then, all the residents of the local communities who live between there and the park entrance are kinda land-locked."

Inside that entrance of the park the road that heads towards Longmire sustained some undercutting from water at a spot where flooding in November 2006 took out the Sunshine Campground.

“We’ll be evaluating that once we get a chance to," the deputy superintendent said. "We may not get to do a full evaluation of that until after this next set of rains that are designed to start tomorrow into Wednesday.”

Rainfall and mudslides combined to close Route 706 just west of the park's Nisqually entrance/WSDOT

West of the park's Carbon River corner a landslide took out a section of the Carbon River Forest Service Road, said Swarthout.

“It ate a vehicle. That (road) is washed out and the county is looking at some kind of detour,” she said. “The road had already fallen down and then the vehicle drove off into the empty space, from what I understand. And the guy walked away with scratches. He was very lucky.”

Back at Longmire, the National Park Inn had water in the basement, as did the Longmire Administration Building.

"They did have feet of water in the basement of the (inn) and inches of water in the Longmire Admin Building, and we’re pumping and working with staff around the clock to protect the critical electrical systems," the deputy said.

It's pretty normal for park crews in spring to find that fall and winter weather inflicted some damage to park trails and facilities, and Swartout figured that would be the case later this spring.

"Based on the amount of rain and kind of widespread lowland flooding, lowland mudslides that happen in all quadrants of the park, (it's likely) that we would be seeing some of that in backcountry trails and structures,” she said.