The Iron Goat Trail: A Railroad Reclaimed by Forest
Near Stevens Pass Area, Washington
The gentle path that traces the hillside here was once a railroad. This is the Iron Goat Trail, built along the original Great Northern grade that first climbed over Stevens Pass in eighteen ninety three. The name comes from the mountain goat that the Great Northern used as its corporate emblem.
Walk it and you enter a strange industrial ruin swallowed by forest, crumbling concrete snowsheds with their wooden roofs long since rotted away, back walls standing as much as thirty feet high, and the black mouths of old tunnels. These snowsheds were the railroad's answer to the killing snows. Between about nineteen ten and nineteen seventeen, after the Wellington avalanche took ninety six lives, the Great Northern roofed miles of track here to shield trains from the slides.
When the long, low Cascade Tunnel opened in nineteen twenty nine, this whole upper line was abandoned and left to the woods. Beginning in the nineteen eighties, volunteers began clearing and rebuilding the grade as an interpretive trail, and it opened to the public in nineteen ninety three. Signs along the way tell the story of the workers who built, and sometimes died on, this mountain railroad.
