If you go
left from where we started, there's an old tunnel. A sign outside proclaims
"Goodbye Switchbacks!" It reads "As you stand in front
of this tunnel, imagine being a rock miner who worked seven days a week
for three years. Or an engineer who surveyed the line so accurately that
when the tunnel was holed through, the two sides were almost perfectly
aligned. Imagine being a train engineer who was thankful to avoid the
twelve miles of switchbacks but apprehensive about the tunnel which trapped
exhaust smoke from the coal-fired engines. The 2.6 mile Cascade Tunnel
was completed in 1900 and connected Wellington and Cascade Tunnel Station
on the east side of the Cascade Mountains." You can't actually go
very far into the tunnel because it has collapsed - water coming down
through ceiling, rocks strewn about, and then shortly past that, the ceiling
and the mountain above it on the floor.
Avalanches
are a major problem in the Cascades so they built snowsheds to re-route
the snow across the tracks (and train) and down the other side. That's
Trish standing in front of the beginning of the snowshed. As you can see
from the second pic, it didn't always work. Even though this snowshed
was reinforced cement, there was an avalanche sufficient to collapse the
other end of it. You can read about the horrible loss of life on the web
site. As you walk along the inside of the snow shed, there are spikes
and other artifacts on display. It's chilly under there and flat-out cold
in the tunnels.
The first
pic shows trees downed in that avalanche. You can barely make out the
end corner of the snowshed in the upper right quadrant of the picture.
The second shows the back end of a tunnel closed by an avalanche. Don't
know why I didn't take a pic of the front of the tunnel.
From part
of the trail, you can see the new tunnel far below that's still in use
today.