Iron Goat Trail

Park rangers refuse to visit after dark. In 1910, an avalanche swept two trapped trains off a mountain ledge here, killing 96 people in the deadliest snow slide in U.S. history. Paranormal investigators have documented phantom train whistles, singing voices, and a spirit in the old tunnel that told a medium to "piss off."

Park rangers refuse to visit the disaster site after dark. That fact alone tells you something about the Iron Goat Trail, a hiking path cut along the old Great Northern Railway grade at Stevens Pass in the Cascade Mountains. On March 1, 1910, ninety-six people died here in the deadliest avalanche in United States history.

The two trains had been stuck for six days. Spokane Local No. 25 and Fast Mail No. 27 passed through the old Cascade Tunnel on February 23 and stopped at the tiny depot town of Wellington, perched on a narrow ledge high in the mountains. Blizzards dumped snow at rates of a foot per hour, burying tracks and triggering slides that cut off every escape route. Telegraph lines went dead on February 26. Passengers debated whether to move the trains into the nearby tunnel for protection, but superintendent James H. O'Neill refused, citing poor ventilation and locomotive exhaust fumes. Two Spokane lawyers, Lewis Jesseph and John Merritt, organized a small party and hiked out through the drifts to Scenic Hot Springs Hotel two days before the catastrophe. That decision saved their lives.

On the last day of February, rain replaced snow. Thunder and lightning cracked across the mountains, rare and terrifying at that altitude. Just after 1:00 AM on March 1, a lightning strike loosened a massive slab from the face of Windy Mountain. Charles Andrews, a Great Northern employee, turned toward the sound and later described it: "White Death moving down the mountainside above the trains. Relentlessly it advanced, exploding, roaring, rumbling, grinding, snapping, a crescendo of sound that might have been the crashing of ten thousand freight trains." A wall of snow ten feet high, half a mile long, and a quarter mile wide swept both trains off the ledge, hurling them 150 feet into the Tye River valley and burying everything under forty feet of snow.

Thirty-five passengers, fifty-eight railroad employees, and three workers in nearby cabins. Ninety-six dead. Only twenty-three survivors pulled from the wreckage.

The rescues were brutal. Ida Starrett, a young Spokane widow traveling with her three children, was thrown from a mangled car and pinned facedown by a massive tree trunk across her back. Her infant son Francis was trapped beneath her abdomen. She could feel him breathing. She was aware of the exact moment his breathing stopped. After eleven hours of digging, rescuers uncovered her face, sawed away the trunk, and pulled her out, the last person rescued alive. Her nine-year-old daughter Lillian was dead. Her seven-year-old son Raymond survived despite a thirty-inch wood splinter embedded through his forehead, removed by amateur surgery in the Wellington hotel. Photographer Asahel Curtis documented the grim recovery, which stretched twenty-one weeks. The last bodies weren't found until late July.

A coroner's inquest ruled the disaster "beyond human control" but criticized the railroad for insufficient coal supplies, low wages, and the decision to park trains in an unsafe location. Great Northern built a 2,463-foot concrete snowshed at the site and quietly renamed Wellington to "Tye" to escape the name's painful associations. When a new seven-mile tunnel opened in 1929 at a lower elevation, bypassing Wellington entirely, the town was abandoned.

The Iron Goat Trail opened in October 1993, named for the Great Northern's mountain goat logo, built through the efforts of volunteers led by Ruth Ittner. Hikers can find twisted fragments of train wreckage rusting beneath overgrowth, crumbling foundations of the coal tower and inspection shed, and the entrance to the abandoned original Cascade Tunnel. The Travel Channel ranked it among the top five scariest hikes in the United States.

The Northwest Paranormal Investigation Agency has investigated the site nearly weekly since 2004. Lead researcher Vaughn Hubbard, along with co-founders Jayme and Bert Coats, uses scientific equipment rather than psychics or Ouija boards. Hubbard has said: "I've never been up there where somebody hasn't had some kind of experience and got something on video or audio." The team has documented a woman's voice singing and humming as though performing daily chores, plus the wandering spirit of a child. Hikers report phantom train whistles where no trains have run for nearly a century, screams from the old tunnel with no one inside, invisible hands grabbing at clothing, pockets of oppressive icy air, and shadowy figures walking along the tracks who vanish when approached.

Medium Jill Dell, documenting a hike for KUOW public radio, claimed to communicate with entities in the tunnel and captured what she described as a voice from the darkness telling her to "piss off."

Eighteen of the avalanche's victims are buried together at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Seattle's Queen Anne neighborhood, including six who were never identified. More than a century later, the trail's paranormal investigators consider the avalanche site one of the top three haunted locations in Washington state. Something about ninety-six people dying on a mountain ledge in the middle of the night, with no warning and no chance of escape, left a mark. Hikers on the trail can still find twisted rail fragments and locomotive parts half-buried in the forest floor, a century of rust and moss slowly pulling the wreckage out of sight.