Gold Bar: Gateway to the Cascades on US Two

Gold Bar sits where the Cascades begin to close in, the last broad flat place on the Skykomish River valley before the mountains take over. The name arrived with prospectors hoping the gravel bars of the river held placer gold. Some did, briefly. Long before the prospectors, the Skykomish people had a village where the Wallace River meets the Skykomish, right where the town stands now.

What gave Gold Bar a longer life was the railroad. The Great Northern Railway pushed through this valley in the early eighteen nineties on James J. Hill's drive to build the northernmost transcontinental line in the United States. The Skykomish corridor was the path through the Cascades, and the towns along it, including Gold Bar, became supply points for the logging and mining that followed the tracks.

Today Gold Bar is a small city of about twenty-four hundred people, a point where US Two drivers coming out of the Puget Sound lowlands catch their first real view of the Cascade foothills rising ahead. The highway follows almost exactly the path that railroad surveyors picked through this valley over a hundred and thirty years ago. Gold Bar was officially incorporated on September sixteenth, nineteen ten. Wallace Falls State Park lies about two miles northeast of town, and the river below Gold Bar draws rafters to a rapid called the Boulder Drop.