Wellington, Washington, March 1st, 1910.

The mountain had been patient for nine days. On the 10th, it stopped waiting.

Wellington was not much of a town. A power plant, a post office, a grocery, the Baylays Hotel with its well-stocked kitchen,

a saloon, and a handful of shacks clinging to a shelf of rock at the west portal of the

Cascade Tunnel, 5,000 feet up in Washington's Cascade Range.

The whole place existed for one reason, the Great Northern Railway.

Every soul who lived there worked for the railroad,

and the railroad was the only way in or out. The nearest real settlement, a whistle stop called Scenic,

sat miles down a treacherous grade to the west. To the east, the tunnel bored through the mountain

toward Leavenworth and the dry country beyond. On the evening of February 22nd,

two westbound trains left Spokane three hours apart, headed for Seattle and the ports of Puget Sound.

Train number. Twenty-five was the Spokane local, a passenger train hauling seven cars behind a big

twelve-wheeled locomotive. Train number 27 was the fast mail,

loaded with letters and parcels and a handful of clerks to sort them. Together, the two trains

carried roughly 125 passengers and crew. The trip to Seattle should have taken half a day.

It would take the better part of forever. The trains cleared the Cascade

tunnel and emerged at Wellington on February 23rd to find the world had turned white. Snow

fell at a foot per hour. On the worst day, the gauges measured 11 feet. The drifts buried the tracks

in both directions and kept piling higher. Great Northern's rotary plows,

massive spinning blades mounted on locomotives, chewed into the snow and choked on the trees and

debris mixed into it. One broke down. Two stalled between slides. The fourth got stuck at the east

end of the tunnel. The shovelers fared no better, hired hands,

...