TRAPPED IN THE HIGH CASCADES BY A MASSIVE BLIZZARD, TWO TRAINS ARE SWEPT OFF A PRECIPICE BY THE DEADLIEST AVALANCHE IN AMERICAN HISTORY.

“It seemed as if the world were coming to an end,” recalled one observer. “I saw the whole side of the mountain coming down, tearing up everything in its way.”

Acres of crumbling snow were descending with the magisterial grandeur of a dropping theater curtain. “I saw the first rush of snow reach the track [and] swallow the trains,” another witness recalled, “and then there was neither tracks nor trains …”

Gary Krist’s The White Cascade is storytelling on a grand, exciting scale. The tale begins in February 1910 in the midst of a blizzard sweeping across the Pacific Northwest. Two Great Northern Railway trains, heading out from Spokane, are attempting to cross the rugged Cascade Mountains on their way to Seattle. Near the crest of the range, they’re forced to stop; snow has blocked the tracks and the plows are overwhelmed. The delay extends to a full day, then two, then three. On the fourth day, the passengers—trapped on the side of a steep alpine ridge, slowly being buried in snow—hear the sound of avalanches rumbling in the mountains.

To save them, the Great Northern Railway—under James H. O’Neill, the railroad’s supreme snow fighter—marshals an army of men. But the storm is unrelenting. Food supplies are dwindling when the snow shovelers go on strike. Some of the passengers are sick, some exhausted. Others, petrified with fear, demand that O’Neill move the trains from their precarious position. But O’Neill and his army, all but paralyzed by the weather, can do nothing.

On the sixth night, a powerful thunderstorm begins to rage. In the early hours of March 1, as harsh lightning rakes the mountains, the snowfield above the trains collapses: An avalanche of nearly unimaginable size engulfs both trains and sends them tumbling off the mountain and into the canyon below.

Adhering strictly to the historical record but unfolding with the urgency of a thriller, The White Cascade resurrects this true but largely forgotten tragedy, setting its human drama against a rich background of railroad lore, robber baron politics, and the last vestiges of the Wild West on the brink of the modern age. An adventure saga filled with colorful and engaging history, The White Cascade is epic storytelling at its finest