WELLINGTON — This railroad town wasn’t much to begin with, but now it no longer exists.
Too many ghosts.
All you’ll find at the town site just west of Stevens Pass are a parking lot, a restroom and some odd concrete ruins, including a tunnel’s slowly eroding mouth and the tall pillars of an abandoned snowshed curving off into the distance.
But Wellington still has an unsettling story to tell, especially on a gray, wet day.
“Whenever I’m hiking through that old concrete snowshed I always think about what happened there in 1910,” said Tom Davis, a trails coordinator for the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest.
“Just to me, it’s little spooky.”
A short walk inside the shed cut into the steep hillside, there’s a sheltered place to reflect on a mostly forgotten but terrible March night a century ago, when a massive wall of snow swept two Great Northern passenger trains into the Tye River, killing 96 people — the deadliest avalanche in the nation’s history.
These days Wellington, or what’s left of it, is the eastern end of the Iron Goat Trail, a decades-long effort by Volunteers for Outdoor Washington and other groups to turn the long-abandoned railbed of the Great Northern Railway into a pathway.
They’ve done an excellent job, creating a trail that combines mountain scenery, the glory of steam railroading, a tragic story and more step-for-step history than almost any forest walk in the Pacific Northwest.
The trail, on the national forest and in the Stevens Pass Historic District, is off U.S. 2, a worthwhile destination for a day of exploring.
There’s much to absorb, starting with some history.
In 1893, after three years of difficult and dangerous work, the railroad completed its line across the Cascades, connecting the 41-year-old city of Seattle with the Midwest. From the start, the route was trouble: Trains with engines on each end had to struggle up switchbacks to reach the summit.
Steep grades and sharp curves limited speeds and required huge amounts of coal and water to feed locomotives. Worse, snow would pile 25 feet high in places, often immobilizing trains for days while hundreds of shovel-wielding laborers battled to keep the tracks open.
The problem eased somewhat in 1900 when a 2.6-mile-long tunnel was finished with its western portal at Wellington. But there still was winter.
In late February 1910, heavy snow stymied both mechanical plows and men with shovels, stalling the two trains at Wellington for a week. Early on March 1, the thick, wet snow on Windy Mountain gave way, barely missing the town but sweeping away the trains, passengers and crews on board. The last body wasn’t recovered until late July.
After that deadly night, the railroad built Wellington’s snowshed, one of many it was forced to erect to protect track and trains. The bad publicity also persuaded the railroad to rename Wellington as “Tye.”
Faced with huge and unending maintenance costs, the Great Northern ultimately gave up, digging a 7.8-mile tunnel beneath Stevens Pass that’s still used today.
When the new tunnel opened in 1929, the old tracks and towns were abandoned, just 36 years after they were built.
Volunteers for Outdoor Washington began restoring the grade in the 1980s. Trail construction, much of it by weekend work parties, began in 1992 and with help from other organizations, the state and Forest Service, was substantially completed by 2007.
Plans now are to link the trail to the newly created Wild Sky Wilderness.
West of Wellington, trailheads are at Martin Creek and the old town of Scenic. A 12.5-mile loop takes in all the trail, but it’s divided into shorter walks, many wheelchair-accessible.
Everywhere you’ll sense the enormous work it took to carve the grade out of the mountainside, often by hand, often in miserable weather.
The trail widens in spots where camp and section towns such as Corea and Embro once stood. Look closely and you’ll see decaying iron debris and long-junked gear, and the strange rows of rusty iron spikes that emerged where wooden ties rotted.
Archaeologists have sifted through the sites, tracing the history of the line and those who built and maintained it.
All along the trail are remnants of snowsheds, mostly long concrete backwalls reaching 30 feet high, their wooden roofs long rotted away and rivulets from melting snow seeping through their cracks.
There also are several ruined tunnels, but stay out: The ceilings are collapsing.
The trail’s best mid-May through late October. Obviously, the Volunteers for Outdoor Washington and the Forest Service urge you to stay away until the threat of snow is over.
Two years ago, a 15-foot-high avalanche destroyed a bridge and buried hundreds of feet of trail. said Dennis Evans of the outdoors group, “If there was anyone there, no one would’ve survived,” he said.
Though tough for locomotives, the constant grade is easy for humans. Walking along, it’s hard not to reflect on the futility of this attempt to conquer nature, which in a few short decades took back all but the hardiest ruins.
It doesn’t take much to picture the killing cold and snow, the cries of the hurt and dying, the heroic and mostly hopeless efforts to save them.
“It is a bit eerie just to imagine what happened there,” Davis said.
“It’s not a place I’ve ever really wanted to camp overnight.”
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