The snow swirled day after day, driven by breathtaking wind, and piling in drifts some 20 feet high.
Then it started to rain. Lightning stabbed the darkness, illuminating two trains stuck in snow drifts on the tracks at Wellington, near Stevens Pass. Thunder boomed — and a wall of snow 14 feet high let loose and slammed into the trains, sweeping them 150 feet down into the Tye River gorge.
In all, 96 souls were lost in the Wellington disaster on March 1, 1910. It was the most deadly avalanche in U.S. history. A century later, it still is.
The avalanche forever changed railroading through the high Cascades. Afterward, the Great Northern Railroad — today’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe — built massive concrete snowsheds over the tracks. Eventually, a 7.8-mile-long tunnel was built through the mountains at lower elevation, opening in 1929 and still in use.
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