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The Iron Goat Trail is a completely different hike than is normal for me. This is more of a long walk through an area with historical significance than it is a real hike. That said, it’s an odd interpretive walk in that most of these types of family walks are pretty short whereas if you do the entire Iron Goat loop, you’re talking over seven miles and technically that’s only half of the total trail you can walk. Not exactly the stretching of the legs that most families want to do on their way back from a weekend in Leavenworth.
The railroad you’re walking on was completed to the point it could handle rail traffic in 1893 and at the time these were steam engine trains. Evidently the track was plagued with problems from the start. The 180 degree turn I talk about below required the trains to slow to a crawl, which made the whole journey that much longer. The hills had been logged of quite a bit of the timber and the trains themselves were constantly causing fires along the track from sparking wheels and embers from the coal burning engines. These fires were often left to burn due to the ruggedness of the terrain but the combination of logging and fires took the protective vegetation off the hillsides and the avalanches became increasingly worse. Another issue was that in the early part of the century the pass got much more snow than it does now, 15 to 20 feet was not uncommon. This meant constant delays during the winter and constant maintenance by hundreds of workers.
The issues culminated in tragedy in 1910 when two passenger trains got stuck towards the top of the pass, just outside the town of Wellington, in wet heavy snow. After two weeks waiting for a break in the weather an avalanche swept both trains off the track, narrowly missing the little town itself, but it killed almost 100 passengers. The last person from the disaster wasn’t recovered until July of that year. The bad press effectively turned Wellington into a ghost town (bad pun) and today there is nothing left, although you can almost double the official loop by hiking on up the rail beyond Windy Point to the old town of Wellington and then walking back down the original Stevens Pass highway.
After the tragedy, the Great Northern Rail company attempted to fix the avalanche problem by building snow sheds along the route as well as constructing tunnels through some of the most treacherous parts. The main construction took place between 1913 and 1916, with almost 10,000 linear feet of snow shed walls being constructed over that period. That helped but massive resources were still needed to keep the rail open and when a new 8 mile tunnel through the heart of the pass was completed in 1929 this whole section of rail was abandoned.
In all thousands of people, mostly immigrants facing racism and harsh living conditions, worked to build and maintain the rail road, all for a rail that was only in use 36 years. It’s an amazing bit of history.
The trailhead is off Highway 2 at the base of Stevens Pass and is a parking lot with no identified passes necessary to park. There are nice restrooms and some interpretive signage at the trailhead and my guess is most people stop, use the restroom, read the signs and then take a ten or fifteen minute walk and continue on down the mountain. In all honesty they’ll see 90% of what there is to see because the full trail is just an extended walk along the old rail grade. You can also park at the Martin Creek Trailhead but that requires a drive up a forest service road and a Northwest Forest Pass or equivalent.
Another oddity about this trail is that you can actually do a loop as opposed to just hiking out and back. Why? Well, the trail follows the abandoned Great Northern Railway railroad path and that path climbed slowly up the mountain with a large 180 degree turn at what is now the Martin Creek Trailhead. So from the Highway 2 trailhead you climb for almost 3 miles to Martin Creek on the lower trail, which is ADA compliant and accessible for almost anyone, and then you hike up a short connector trail and climb for another 3 miles on the upper section coming back. You’ll eventually reach another connector trail that takes you from the upper section back down to the lower section and the parking lot.
Being a railroad grade, which I believe is usually a maximum of 3 degrees, you really never notice the climb. In fact I would have sworn the entire trail was flat. That is until you hike down the eastern connector trail and have to drop almost 800 vertical feet in less than a mile. Even though the trail feels flat it’s amazing how much elevation you gain over the three miles each way.
One quick workout would be to just hike up the east connector trail from the parking lot to the upper rail and then go east about a quarter mile. This takes you to the Windy Point viewpoint, which is really the only view along the whole trail.
