Wellington: The Worst Avalanche in American History
Near Stevens Pass Area, Washington
On the first of March, nineteen ten, the worst avalanche disaster in American history unfolded on the western slope of Stevens Pass, at a lonely railroad town called Wellington. For days a monstrous storm had pinned two Great Northern trains against the mountain here, a passenger train and a fast mail train, together carrying scores of travelers and railroad workers. They had crossed the mountains from the east and stopped near Wellington when snow and slides blocked the tracks both ahead and behind.
Snow fell at a rate of many feet a day, and the rotary snowplows that fought to clear the line ran low on coal and finally gave up. Then, near one o'clock in the morning, the weather turned. Warm rain moved in, and a crash of thunder echoed over the peaks.
High on the slopes of Windy Mountain, a slab of snow perhaps ten feet high broke loose. It swept down onto the sleeping trains, hurled the cars roughly one hundred fifty feet into the Tye River gorge below, and buried them under tons of snow and shattered timber. Ninety six people died, by the counts most often cited, about thirty five passengers and sixty one railroad employees, though a number of survivors were dug out alive by rescuers who climbed down through the dark.
The bodies had to be hauled over the mountain by sled and toboggan, a grim procession that lasted for weeks. Historians point to more than bad luck. The slopes above Wellington had been stripped of timber by clear cutting and by fires set by sparks from the very locomotives that ran below, leaving nothing to hold the snow in place.
The disaster shamed the railroad. Because the name Wellington had become a byword for death, the Great Northern quietly renamed the town Tye. In the years that followed, the company roofed miles of track with concrete snowsheds, and eventually abandoned this high line entirely for a longer, lower tunnel.
Today Wellington is a ghost town, its snowshed walls still standing among the trees, a silent memorial to the ninety six who never came home.
