Granite Falls, WA

September 2018

In the late 1800s railroad crews tried building a line to bring gold and silver out of the North Cascades. The line ran from the ghost town of Monte Cristo through Old Robe Canyon near Granite Falls. The canyon was too gnarly and they gave up halfway, but their unfinished tunnels and bridges are still in the forest.

Last weekend I went to see what’s left. The first bit of hiking on the county trail was easy, but when I entered the canyon I got the sense I was on my own for safety. The rubble piles from landslides were fresh. I felt the frustration of the crews that tried to build in these conditions as I tried to keep dirt from coming over the top of my boots. The county gave up trying to maintain a trail here too.

Nearing the tunnels, I came to a crumbling 120-year-old concrete bridge like the one Gandolf slew the balrog on at Khazad-dûm. The railing-less walkway sat fifty feet above the river and was probably never meant to be a bridge. It looked like it started as a wall and then formed an arch as the center eroded and the river took the hillside behind it. The trail went right over. I could have detoured, but walking across felt like a test I needed to pass for something sketchier to come.

I reached the tunnels and found three shafts progressively buried in more and more vegetation. The first was longer than I expected with railroad ties that curved around a corner. Places built with dynamite, steam, and donkeys fire me up. I love the ambition of it. The engineering grit. The contrast with the pristine environment around it and nature’s indifference to industry when given a long enough time scale. The final tunnel was a dark cave with a low entrance as if buried by a landslide. A pile of broken timbers marked the spot where they quit, stewing in a puddle for the past century. A mound of excavated rock no one bothered to clear past the entrance added to the drama.