Being ready for anything, anytime, is still key to keeping mountain passes open
A century after the Wellington avalanche near Stevens Pass, Mike Stanford of the Washington State Department of Transportation still faces the same task as the Great Northern Railroad’s Snow King William Harrington: Keeping the mountain open for travel in winter.
Seattle Times staff reporter
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STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
Mike Stanford is in the snowshed built on the site of 1910 Wellington avalanche near Stevens Pass.
The more some things change, the more they really do stay the same.
A century after the Wellington avalanche near Stevens Pass, Mike Stanford of the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) still faces the same task as the Great Northern Railroad’s Snow King William Harrington: Keeping the mountain open for travel in winter.
And unlike the Great Northern, which bailed on its high-elevation route, taking its railroad inside a tunnel opened in 1929, there’s no tunnel refuge for WSDOT.
To be sure, the department closes some highways for winter, rather than battle the snow. But it’s the department’s duty to keep the state’s two major east-west routes, Highway 2 and Interstate 90, open every day of the year.
With some five stories of snow falling on average each winter at Stevens, and 450 inches of snowfall at Snoqualmie Pass, the work can be unrelenting. Or uneventful, such as this winter that wasn’t.
Of course, it still could prove snowy — and being ready for anything, anytime, is part of the job.
The department keeps a surplus military tank at the Wellington town site. Its gun barrel is aimed all winter long at the mountainside above the highway, at the Old Faithful avalanche chute, to fire shells at snow threatening to block travel, or worse, sweep motorists off the mountainside.
“It’s the same problem,” said Stanford, who says he thinks of the men here before him. Of course the department today has tools they never did: instant communications; modern weather- and avalanche-prediction techniques. And all the fun stuff: a tank, a bunker full of explosives and a fleet of massive plows.
He’s a man with deep humility born of a career in mountain weather. “There are no avalanche experts,” he said. “Only avalanche professionals.”
The last time he heard a self-proclaimed “expert” say he knew exactly where avalanches would occur on the mountain, “the hair stood up on the back of my neck,” Stanford said.
Like his compatriots at Snoqualmie, with which there is a friendly rivalry, the crews at Stevens Pass contend not only with the weather but with drivers who seem to have no sense they are in a mountain pass, or of the dangers of mountain weather.
“We once had this guy who thought he had four-wheel drive because he had four wheels,” Stanford said. He wasn’t kidding.
WSDOT crews hold up travel across the mountain as they bombard snow chutes with explosives, hoping to make avalanches come when and where they want them. Snowplows scoop up whatever hits the road, and travelers are on their way. In as little as 20 minutes, at Stevens. Usually.
But even for a modern Snow King, Stanford said, “There’s is no way to predict Mother Nature.”
Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com
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