Ashford, WA

Ashford is a census-designated place mostly in Pierce County, with a small portion across the Nisqually River in Lewis County. The 2020 census counted 303 residents. The community sits west of Mount Rainier’s Nisqually Entrance, six miles from the park gate along State Route 706, the Road to Paradise. Walter A. Ashford homesteaded here in 1888, and the settlement grew in the narrow, forested Nisqually valley.

State Route 706 is Ashford’s organizing road, carrying visitors, workers, and supplies toward Longmire and Paradise. The road also gives Ashford its practical rhythm, with deliveries and seasonal traffic passing through the valley. The Mount Rainier Gateway Initiative began after the community asked for help protecting mature forest, river wetlands, and the wooded highway corridor around town. Ashford’s map is part gateway, part river valley, and part mountain settlement: lodging and service businesses, forest roads, the Nisqually River, and the park road meet here. It is a small Washington community whose daily life is shaped by living beside a national park without being inside its boundary.