Haunted Trails & Forgotten Places: Iron Goat Trail
Of all the places I visited during my October 2018 season of haunted hikes, the Iron Goat Trail may be the one where the history itself was enough to create an atmosphere.
You don’t need a ghost story to make this landscape feel haunted.
The mountain already has one.
I remember walking into the landscape and feeling the layers of time almost immediately.
The forest had that deep, quiet presence that comes with being surrounded by mountains. The old railroad grade stretched ahead through the trees, and every so often there would be another reminder that this wasn’t always a hiking trail.
This had once been a working railroad.
People had walked here.
Trains had passed through here.
And somewhere beneath the forest, beneath the trail and the moss and the years of growth, was the story of what happened in the winter of 1910.
I knew the history before I arrived.
But knowing it and standing there were two different things.
The Mountain Crossing
Today, the Iron Goat Trail follows what remains of the former route of the Great Northern Railway through Washington’s Cascade Mountains.
The trail moves along the old railroad grade, through forest and beneath steep mountain slopes. Old structures remain. Tunnel entrances disappear into the mountainside. The railroad is gone, but its footprint is still remarkably visible.
It doesn’t take much imagination to understand what this place once was.
The route through the Cascades was an enormous undertaking.
In 1889, C.F.B. Haskell was sent by the Great Northern Railway to help locate a suitable crossing through the mountains.
He knew he was heading into rugged, largely undeveloped country.
In a letter to his wife dated December 7, 1889, he wrote:
“I start tomorrow morning....I have marked with ink as possible the country I am to go through. It is a wild mountainous country not even surveyed...I go prepared to camp out...eat deer or anything I can get.
It is the grandest expedition I ever undertook. The consumption of all my boyish dreams”.
~ Haskell’s letter to his wife, December 7, 1889.
He expected to camp along the way and survive on whatever food he could find.
Yet he was exhilarated by it.
He described the expedition as the grandest he had ever undertaken and connected it to the dreams he had carried since childhood.
I find that contrast fascinating.
The mountains could inspire awe and ambition at the same time they demanded respect.
The railroad builders saw a route that needed to be conquered.
The mountain had no such intention of cooperating.
And eventually, winter would become the greatest threat of all.
Wellington
The town of Wellington grew around the railroad near the western portal of the Cascade Tunnel; it was a railroad town, a place of work, a place where trains stopped, and crews lived and worked as they moved through the Cascades.
During the winter, though, the mountains could become an entirely different world.
Snow could close the tracks.
Avalanches could come down the slopes.
And in the winter of 1910, the snow kept coming.
Two trains became stranded near Wellington after heavy snowfall blocked the tracks.
The passengers waited.
Railroad crews worked to clear the route.
And still the snow continued.
Imagine being there.
A train stopped in the mountains.
Winter closing in around you.
The knowledge that the railroad was blocked and that you couldn’t simply leave.
Waiting for the tracks to be cleared.
Waiting for the weather to change.
Waiting to continue your journey.
Then, on March 1, 1910, an enormous avalanche came down the mountain.
It swept the two trains from the tracks and into the valley below.
Ninety-six people died.
The Wellington disaster remains one of the deadliest avalanche disasters in United States history.
“Almost 100 lives were cut short here due to a railroad disaster in 1910. It was the worst disaster of its kind in United States history.
The avalanche that caused the disaster ~ a derailing of two passenger trains ~ is said to have sealed the spirits of the unlucky passengers in the tunnels, who are still trying to escape their tomb.
The tracks were moved after the tragedy, but the tunnels remain. Delve into these lightless corridors, but know you’re not the only thing in there trying to find a way out”.
The tragedy wasn’t folklore.
It wasn’t a ghost story that grew bigger with every retelling.
It happened.
They had families.
They had destinations.
They had jobs.
They were traveling through the mountains.
They were waiting for the snow to clear.
And then the mountain changed everything.
Walking Into the Past
That knowledge stayed with me as I walked the trail.
It’s one thing to read that a disaster happened somewhere.
It’s another thing to stand in the actual landscape.
The trees around you are alive now, but they were growing, or their ancestors were growing, on a mountain that witnessed something completely different.
The ground beneath your feet was once busy with people and machinery.
Now it’s quiet.
The soundscape is different.
The purpose is different.
The people are different.
But the route is still there.
And then you come to the tunnels.
There is something about a tunnel on an old railroad line that immediately changes the feeling of a hike.
You look into the darkness ahead and know that this wasn’t built for hikers.
It was built for trains.
For workers.
For people who needed to get through the mountain.
I remember being aware of that history as I moved through the landscape.
I wasn’t simply walking by a tunnel.
I was walking near something that had belonged to another world.
And that was the strange part.
Nothing supernatural had to happen.
The history was enough.
The Railroad That Disappeared
After the Wellington disaster, the railroad eventually changed its route through the Cascades.
The tracks were moved to a safer alignment.
Wellington eventually disappeared as a functioning railroad town.
The trains stopped coming.
The railroad’s old route was abandoned.
But the mountain didn’t change with the railroad.
The tunnels remained.
The grade remained.
The slopes remained.
The snow still came.
And eventually, people began walking through this landscape for an entirely different reason: not because they needed to get somewhere, but because they wanted to be there.
That’s a strange transformation.
A place that once represented transportation, industry, danger, and survival became a hiking trail.
People now arrive carrying water bottles and cameras instead of railroad equipment.
We stop to take photographs.
We look at the remnants.
We read the signs.
We walk slowly.
We have the luxury of leaving whenever we want.
The people who were here in 1910 did not.
And Then There Are the Ghost Stories
Of course, the ghost stories came too.
There have been reports and stories of strange sounds, voices, footsteps, cold sensations, and other unexplained experiences around the old railroad corridor and Wellington.
Some people say they have heard what sounds like a train.
Others describe voices or footsteps in the tunnels.
And one particularly haunting version of the folklore suggests that the spirits of those who died in the avalanche remain connected to the tunnels, still trying to find their way out.
It’s a powerful story.
Especially when you are standing at the entrance to one of those dark tunnels.
But there is an important distinction between the story and the history.
Because folklore tells us something about the way human beings respond to places where terrible things have happened.
October on the Iron Goat
I was there in October 2018, during a season when I was deliberately seeking out places with stories of the strange and unexplained.
So I arrived with that mindset.
I was looking for the atmosphere.
I was looking for the places where the ordinary world felt just slightly different.
The place already had weight.
The forest had reclaimed parts of the railroad.
The old structures felt like fragments of another era.
The tunnels created their own darkness.
And knowing what had happened here changed the way I looked at everything.
A stretch of trail wasn’t simply a stretch of trail anymore.
It was part of an old railroad grade.
A mountain slope wasn’t simply beautiful.
It was part of the landscape that had produced the avalanche.
A tunnel wasn’t simply an interesting feature.
It was a place where railroad workers and passengers had once traveled through the darkness.
The past kept inserting itself into the present, and I found myself walking a little differently because of it; not necessarily afraid, just aware.
The Mountain Still Knows
The forest has grown around the remnants of the railroad, but it hasn’t erased what happened.
It has simply grown over it.
And that feels important.
Because nature doesn’t necessarily erase history.
Sometimes it incorporates it, and underneath it all, the old story remains.
Where the Mountain Remembers
Maybe that’s why the ghost stories have endured.
Maybe it’s because we don’t want the people who died here to become just names and numbers.
We want to imagine that some part of them is still present.
Still walking.
Still waiting.
Still trying to find a way out.
I don’t know whether there are ghosts on the Iron Goat Trail.
I don’t need to decide.
Because there is something more powerful than proving whether a place is haunted.
It is standing in that place and remembering that people were here.
The tunnels still open into darkness.
The mountains still rise above the trail.
The forest continues to grow.
And the story is still here.
Sometimes the mountain doesn’t need to speak.
Sometimes the history is already loud enough.
References & rabbit holes
Washington Trails Association ~ Iron Goat Trail
Washington Trails Association ~ Wellington Ghost Town
Washington Trails Association ~ Haunted Hikes
If the story of Wellington leaves you curious, there are plenty of places to keep wandering. Explore the Iron Goat Trail, read more about the Wellington disaster, or dive into the history of the old Cascade Tunnel. And if you want to really fall down the rabbit hole, The White Cascade by Gary Krist tells the story of the disaster in much greater depth.
Continue Exploring October in the Apothecary
Poisonous Plants, Medicine & Myth
Old plants, strange histories, medicine, mythology, folklore, and the stories humans have woven around the botanical world.
Haunted Trails & Forgotten Places
Old paths, forgotten places, local history, and the stories that linger in landscapes long after the people have gone.
More October stories will be added throughout the month.
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