North Cascades

EARLY IMPRESSIONS: EURO-AMERICAN EXPLORATIONS AND SURVEYS

SURVEYS

Washington Board of State Road Commissioners (1895)

Efforts for an overland route continued, and in 1895 a new commission was created. The Washington Board of State Road Commissioners was appointed under an Act of the State Legislature on March 22, 1895 to survey four different routes through the North Cascades. These routes would take the surveyors through the mountains via Slate Creek, the North Fork of Thunder Creek (Park Creek Pass), Cascade Pass, and Rainy Pass. [114] All four routes brought the surveyors well into today's national park.

Between July 22 and September 11, 1895, engineer Bert Huntoon and commissioners E.M Wilson, R.O. Welts, and J. Howard Watson traversed approximately 500 miles of the North Cascades. Whenever possible the group followed trails established earlier by Indians and miners. Still, they were often forced to open new trails along most of the Rainy Pass route and "travel without a trail over a part of the Thunder Creek route." [115] Because of these conditions and the speed of the pack animals, progress was slow: on good trails they covered upwards of 18 to 20 miles a day, on poor trails or in places where extensive survey work was required they made as little as three miles in a day. Barometric altitudes and profiles were recorded and tabled along the way, as well as elevations of six mountain passes and distances between major points. A map of the country was compiled with natural features delineated including all streams and their true courses, as well as the names and locations of settlers' cabins encountered along the way: "This map is of inestimable value to the state, as all of the present government and state maps of this section are woefully erroneous and misleading." [116]

The four-man group departed from Marblemount where they had obtained horses and "pack outfits" for their trip, examining the Slate Creek route first. Their observations of the upper Skagit River region in 1895 are a valuable source of information today:

The trail to Slate Creek from Marble Mount runs for seventeen miles through the forest and along the Skagit River, over a fairly-level country, but after the first four miles some rock is found. In the tenth mile the "Devil's Dream" (a trail made in front of a rock wall by rude bridges above the Skagit River to avoid rock work) is reached. The trail then runs along level bottom land mostly until the end of the seventeenth mile is reached. The eighteenth mile begins with a rock point, where the Skagit Canyon and rapids are first encountered. The trail here passes along a very high rock bluff, and the work is heavy for the first mile, but some lighter in the nineteenth mile, which brings us to the site of the old goat trail bridge, which washed away in the floods of 1894. At this point the celebrated "Goat Trail" begun [sic] and extended to Cedar Bar [Davis Family Homestead location], a distance of 2 1/2 miles; and, up to within a few days of our arrival, the only mode of travel over it was on foot, using a ladder to scale the most difficult points. The volunteer work [by miners] done in the spring of 1895 by blasting half tunnels through perpendicular cliffs and constructing rude bridges across chasms made it passable for small horses, but still the grades, in places, are excessive, and the bridges and trail dangerous and difficult for even the lightest pony traffic. . . . It is a picturesque place and rugged enough for the most ardent mountain climber. [117]

From Stetattle Creek, near Cedar Bar, the party continued upriver about three miles, coming to the junction of the "old Thunder Creek bridge." The Thunder Creek route branched off at this point. Continuing up the main river trail, the party climbed around Sourdough Mountain noting: "this climb being necessary as the Skagit River here runs in a rock canyon where road building is impossible without extraordinary expense. . . ." [118] The surveyors determined that the only route for a wagon road in this area would require dropping down to the Skagit River at the mouth of Ruby Creek after crossing Sourdough Mountain.

At the junction of the Methow and Twisp Rivers the party embarked on the second leg of their assignment, which would return them to Marblemount via Cascade Pass. Following the Methow River to the confluence of the "Twitsp" River, the men pushed on, crossing the latter to the north side and proceeding along an established trail. After crossing Twisp Pass the party dropped down to the confluence of Bridge Creek and the Stehekin River.

Going up the Stehekin River valley there is an easy water grade on bottom land for seven miles . . . From Pershall's [an early Stehekin valley settler and miner] cabin (the seven mile point) there are steep side-hills, with slide rock for about one mile, to the head of the Stehekin, when a stiff climb is made to the pass 2 1/2 miles, (or three miles by the engineer's estimate) of 2,400 feet . . . . Cascade Pass has an icy appearance even in summer as the Glaciers hug it close and snow remains in the shady side of the pass generally all the summer. [119]

From Cascade Pass the surveyors proceeded down the western slope of the ridge, noting that "the old trail is down a very steep slope and decidedly uninviting, no perceptible work even [sic] having been done on it." [120] Within two and a half miles the party reached Gilbert Landre's cabin on the Cascade River. Landre was an early settler and miner in the region who ran a roadhouse in the backcountry. From Landre's cabin, the group followed a good, mostly level trail to Marblemount, a distance of about 20 miles.

The next excursion was the Thunder Creek route leading the surveyors over Park Creek Pass. Retracing their steps along the Skagit River and the Goat Trail to where Thunder Creek joins the Skagit River, the party noted:

Thunder Creek here comes through a rocky gorge, a rare picture of beauty, but expensive from the road builders point of view. It empties into the Skagit River which here runs through a rocky canyon, and unless one stands directly in front of Thunder Creek its place of entrance into the river is hidden by the close towering walls. [121]

Continuing up Thunder Creek the surveyors traveled along an established miner's trail noting "the route is easy, the present narrow trail being fairly well graded, but needing a great deal of work." [122] At the ten-mile point a "tree" bridge redirected the trail across the creek where it then continued up toward Thunder Creek Pass (Park Creek Pass today) traversing a steep slope on which a trail had never been built. From the pass the party descended to Bridge Creek. Having already traversed the route along Bridge Creek to Twisp Pass, the men retraced their steps and returned to Marblemount.

The last route led the surveyors along the previously traveled Slate Creek route to Granite Creek. Beginning at Marblemount and traveling to Ruby Creek the party crossed Rainy Pass, "along which a trail had never been even blazed," and then proceeded down Bridge Creek to State Creek, up State Creek to Washington Pass, and then down Early Winters Creek to the Methow River valley. [123] Except for the initial part of the journey this route led the surveyors outside the boundaries of today's park.

The commissioners published their findings in a report in 1896. Photographs were taken on the four routes depicting scenes along the Skagit River and Ruby Creek. The "Approach to Devil's Corner" (the footbridge visible and accessible today) and Devil's Corner itself (not accessible today) were also photographed. Apparently impressed by the ingenuity of miners, the commissioners elaborated on their efforts:

[the] Goat trail is truly picturesque and shows the energy displayed by the active interests of the Slate Creek mining district in opening a way of ingress and egress. There is considerable of this [photo depicting a trail beneath a rock overhang] which is built in the most available places without regard to grades and the roof just high enough for pack horses to pass under safely. [124]

After careful consideration of all four routes, the Board determined: "the route up the Twitsp [sic] River, over Twitsp Pass, down Bridge Creek, up the Stehekin River, over Cascade. . . Pass and down the Cascade River the shortest and the most feasible and practicable." [125]

Road work did actually commence as a result of the 1895 survey. In the spring of 1896, and with a road width of forty feet established, foremen and laborers were hired to begin the work. On the east side of the mountains, Stehekin valley settler Merritt Field contracted with the state to operate "the boarding houses [for laborers] at the two central camps on lower Bridge Creek and Stehekin, doing all of the packing and moving of these two camp outfits, as desired, free of cost to the State." [126] The road crew was able to construct a road from Stehekin to Bridge Creek, running past Coon Lake (a later road, a mine-to-market road, was built from Bridge Creek to Horseshoe Basin in the 1940s). The "road" to Bridge Creek, however, was not without faults: logs lay across it and large rocks were never removed. Consequently, the road was not used. Today, portions of this route have become a hiking trail within the national park. Some valley residents contend the early road can still be followed in its entirety, despite the vegetation that has grown over it.

In 1896, a road on the west side was built twelve miles up the Cascade River but it too was never completed across Cascade Pass. Ironically, the road that would eventually traverse the mountains followed a route that the commissioners had determined to be the longest and "the most expensive part of the Slate Creek route." [127] The North Cross State Highway, also known as the North Cascades Highway, was completed 77 years after these men surveyed the region -- more than one and one half centuries after the first recorded crossing of the North Cascades was accomplished by a Euro-American.