1910 Stevens Pass avalanche still deadliest in US history Seattle Times
The snow swirled day after day, driven by breathtaking detectable, and piling in drifts some 20 feet stiff.
Then it started to rain. Lightning stabbed the darkness, illuminating two trains stuck in snow drifts on the tracks at Wellington, just about Stevens Pass. Rail at boomed — and a face ruin of snow 14 feet tall let loose and slammed into the trains, radical them 150 feet down into the Tye River defile.
In all, 96 souls were vanished in the Wellington disaster on Walk 1, 1910. It was the most deadly avalanche in U.S. retailing. A century later, it still is.
The avalanche forever changed railroading through the squeaky Cascades. Afterward, the Extensive Northern Railroad — today's Burlington Northern Santa Fe — built massy concrete snowsheds over the tracks. Later, a 7.8-mile-eat one's heart out tunnel was built through the mountains at stoop elevation, opening in 1929 and still in use.
Hulks of the snowsheds, and an earlier, shorter Chunnel, can be seen from the Iron Goat Move, a recreational and historic interpretive hiking track on the old railroad grade, including the Wellington township site near the offensive of Windy Mountain. The city was renamed Tye by the railroad, in an venture to bury bad PR along with the dead.