Mount Baker-Snoqualmie: The Railroad That Built a Pass
Near Stevens Pass Area, Washington
The Great Northern Railway needed to cross the Cascades. James J. Hill, the builder of the Great Northern and one of the most relentless railroad promoters in American history, had been pushing his line west through Montana and Washington since the late eighteen eighties. The question was where to put the tunnel.
Stevens Pass, at an elevation of four thousand and sixty feet, was identified by John F. Stevens in eighteen ninety. Stevens was Hill's chief surveyor and would later become one of the engineers of the Panama Canal. He found the pass by following a river valley into the mountains in winter, in temperatures that fell far below zero, and concluding from the drainage patterns that a low crossing had to exist somewhere in this stretch of the range. He found it. The Great Northern crossed the Cascades at Stevens Pass in eighteen ninety-three.
The original crossing used a series of switchbacks to climb and descend the grades. It was slow and expensive. In nineteen hundred, the railroad opened a two-point-six-mile tunnel through the mountain. The switchbacks were abandoned.
Three years later, in nineteen ten, one of the worst rail disasters in American history occurred at Wellington, a small station on the west side of the pass. An avalanche swept two trains off a ledge into a canyon four hundred feet below, killing ninety-six people. The disaster led to major reforms in avalanche monitoring and drove the construction of a new, longer tunnel, which opened in nineteen twenty-nine and was the longest railroad tunnel in the Western Hemisphere until a Canadian tunnel surpassed it in nineteen eighty-nine; at nearly eight miles, it remains in daily use today.
Stevens Pass today is a ski area and a Cascade crossing on US Highway Two. The Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, which covers the western slopes of the range from the Canadian border south to Mount Rainier, holds the history of both the railroad era and the century of recreational use that followed it.
