A Final Note on the Wellington Avalanche
Whether the Wellington avalanche was a tragedy that could reasonably have been anticipated by those in charge of the situation was—and still is—a debatable question. Avalanche science was barely in its infancy in 1910, and as the Washington State Supreme Court noted, avalanche predictions at that time were “clearly beyond the knowledge of men.” Several reports published in the wake of that year’s snowslide season, however, indicate that perhaps more was known than the Great Northern cared to admit. An article in the June 1910 edition of the Monthly Weather Review and a report published by the U.S. Forest Service in November 1911 suggest that a basic grasp of what was occurring at Stevens Pass was not beyond the knowledge of the day, and that a slide above the trains should not have been regarded as such an improbability.
Admittedly, the reports do support many of the railroad’s contentions about the unusual nature of conditions in late February 1910. Edward A. Beals, author of the Monthly Weather Review article, confirmed that it had been an unprecedented avalanche season both in the Cascades and in the northern Rockies. “Avalanches in these mountains are of common occurrence every year,” he wrote, “but this year there were more than ever before known.” The period in question actually saw thousands of slides across the Northwest, including large ones in Idaho and British Columbia (such as the Rogers Pass slide, Canada’s deadliest) that resulted in particularly high numbers of casualties. Beals’s report also verified the unusual length of the late-February storm, revealing that it was actually not a single storm but three separate disturbances that passed through the area in close succession.
The type of slide that occurred at Wellington, moreover, was regarded as relatively rare in the area. Witnesses at both the inquest and the trial claimed that the vast majority of slides in the Cascades were what are now called loose-snow avalanches. They were perceived as more or less predictable, coming down in draws and canyons where they had come down in past years. (Thornton T. Munger, author of the Forest Service report, even used the term “canyon slide” for this type of avalanche, as opposed to “slope slide” for what is now called a slab avalanche.) Loose-snow avalanches tend to start at a single point and fan out in the form of an inverted V, and they can start quite literally at the drop of a hat. As the trapper Robert Schwartz testified at the inquest, by shaking a bit of snow off a single tree branch, “a bird or an icicle or a puff of wind can start a snowslide.”
However, the absence of a draw or canyon above the passing tracks certainly did not make that slope immune to the slab-type of avalanche. Weather patterns in the days and weeks before March 1 had in fact created ideal conditions for this type of slide. At roughly thirty-two degrees, the slope of the mountainside at that point was also right within the optimum range for sliding. Even the covering of burned trees that the GN regarded as a factor working against avalanche formation actually had the opposite effect. Thick forest may discourage slides from forming, but sparse tree cover provides weak points in the snowpack where avalanches can start more easily.
It would be unfair to assert that O’Neill and Blackburn should have foreseen the imminent danger of a slide and diverted all of their limited resources to either moving the trains or evacuating those who slept on them. But certainly the particular risk created by a hard freeze followed by a thawing trend was not unknown to the men of the Cascade Division. Even the lowly trackwalker Thomas O’Malley testified as much at the inquest. “Heavy wet snow on the hills will do it,” he said in answer to a question from state railroad commissioner Lawrence on how slides start. “Sometimes the snow is frozen underneath, and [if we] get a couple nights’ fall of snow, it will slide right off the hard crust.”
In retrospect, it’s clear that the situation at Wellington should have been handled differently. As conductor Walter Vogel admitted in his court testimony, other locations around Wellington, “as shown by conditions afterwards,” would have been safer places to put the trains. But “conditions afterwards” are unknowable beforehand. In a crisis of this type, the gaps between foresight and hindsight are invariably great, and the parallax they create is one that historians and other latter-day observers cannot afford to ignore.