Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Vol. I

I imagine that a lot of folks who have never lived in the North Cascades and even many of the people charged with managing its resources who don’t actually live here drive up on Highway 20 and see a rural pastoral landscape and small towns with a mix of nice houses and ramshackle buildings in the valley. On a clear day, they will see this scenery with a backdrop of pretty mountains and possibly some wildlife or maybe a little interesting natural history.  But I don’t know as they see much else.

Having grown up here, as I drive Highway 20, I am literally driving through history. I can’t go very far along the highway between Concrete and Rainy Pass without passing a place that has some significance to me. Maybe it touches on history that reaches back before European contact or maybe it is family history that goes back over 100 years or maybe it is something that happened in the short span of time that I have been on this earth. It might be a bit of natural history or history of land use and how the land has changed over my short lifetime. Or maybe it is simply places where people I know live or used to live.

A lot of this information will be common knowledge to people who live here or grew up here. I am sure anyone who has lived here any length of time has similar stories and history unique to their experience and some of these folks would have a version of the same information found in this post that is different from mine.

I don’t think much of this type of knowledge is captured in history books anywhere. I have noticed that a lot of folks who wax so eloquent about the North Cascades depend on books, often written by people who also don't live here, for most of their information on this area. Much of the information in this post isn’t usually found in books. It is a kind of living knowledge that comes from people actually living here, not reading about it in some reference and it depends upon people living here to survive. I often don’t give it a lot of thought but, upon reflection, this type of knowledge gives this place a much deeper meaning than the rather shallow and simplistic impressions left with someone who is just passing through or only staying for a little while, no matter how many books about the place they have read. In this post I have purposely avoided places that I know are well recorded in books.  

When I was in the U. S. Navy I traveled to a lot of beautiful places in Hawaii and the South Pacific but none of them were home. I think this is mostly because I didn’t know the local stories for all the little places. The broader history, of these places, of each nation and its peoples, and of huge international events like the Second World War are well recorded. But the local history that gives a place its depth and spirit and soul, an extra dimension that makes a place real wasn’t readily available to an outsider like myself who wasn’t making a permanent stake there.

Here is a small glimpse of some of what I know about a small part of Highway 20 in the area that I call home. I know a lot of the houses along Highway 20, who lived there, or who lives there still and sometimes even who built them. For the most part, I have left out the names of people and houses I know along the Highway for privacy concerns. I have included a few names of people who are associated with certain places who are now no longer with us or are no longer associated with those places. I have tried to make these stories as true to reality or history as possible but one should remember that I am not omniscient so I don’t know everything. Neither am I infallible. Some stories I may have gotten wrong or misunderstood when they were passed down to me or I may have simply misremembered some things. The area along Highway 20 is just a small part of the place I call home but I chose it because it will be the most familiar to the most people.

Milepost 90

Milepost 90 is just outside the city limits of Concrete. The road goes through a large deposit of glacial sediment, here. There are a lot of clay deposits, undoubtedly glacial in origin as well, on top of this deposit that have a tendency to slide during heavy rains. 

A former geologist for Mount Baker/Snoqualmie National Forest told me that he could predict these slides pretty well by looking at the amount of rainfall that occurs over a given period of time. I don’t remember the exact numbers but it was something like 3 or 4 inches over 24 or 48 hours. If I remember correctly, his thought was that the amount of rainfall generated in one of these storm events over that short period of time overwhelms the water absorption capacity of a mini basin or watershed on top of the glacial deposit. There is a clay layer in this mini basin that prevents the rainwater from rapidly draining away through it so the rainwater collects, saturates the soil on top of the clay layer and possibly part of the clay layer itself and, when the capacity of this soil to hold any more water is exceeded, a slide occurs. Slides are probably made worse by all the clay because it becomes slick when wet and basically lubricates the debris flow.

I have seen this area slide a number of times. There are a number of small gullies cutting through the glacial deposit where the slides usually occur. From my observation, there doesn’t seem to be any one gully that is a perennial problem. Slides occur in every one of the gullies. A few years back a slide took out the power lines for the area east of Concrete. We were without power for about a week. To date in recorded history there hasn’t been a slide here as big as the one that just occurred in Oso but there is the potential here for a similar catastrophic failure. It wouldn't surprise me if one or more major slides that I am unaware of have occurred here in recorded history. 

When I was in high school in the early 1980’s, there was a big slide in one of the gullies closest to Concrete. The material from this slide was hauled to the other side of town and dumped on the south side of Highway 20 just west of the intersection of  Highway 20 and Superior Avenue. Shortly afterward a gas station/convenience store called Ratcliff’s (I don't remember the exact spelling) Store was built on top of it. At that time, they sold the cheapest gas around. The gas station is now called Logger’s Landing. If you look there today, there is a drive-in restaurant on the west side of Superior Avenue. Just west of this restaurant is Logger’s Landing. You will notice that Logger’s Landing is 4 or 5 feet higher than the restaurant. This is because it is sitting on a bench created by the fill from the big slide east of Concrete in the early 1980’s.

The clay deposits extend west from the Highway 20 road cut and are perched above much of the eastern part of Concrete, what was once known as East Baker. There have been quite a few slides here over the years. Hopefully these warnings and the recent tragic event at Oso will spur some thinking about how deal with such an eventuality here. 

The situation on the east end of Concrete is not exactly the same as at Oso but this is still a hard problem. I know a lot of people who live there and the church my family attends is there. This church also used to be a hospital whose attending doctor delivered a lot of my aunts and uncles as well as my dad. I wouldn’t want to see these places condemned but I also wouldn’t want to see family and friends buried under a mountain of mud. The hillside here will come down some day. It is as inevitable as gravity, which drives the whole process. I don’t have any answers myself but starting to think about it is maybe a good first step. Believe it or not, I had much of the draft for this post written several days before the Oso slide occurred.

Back to the glacial deposit at Milepost 90 on the east side of Concrete. The cut through this deposit was originally made for the railroad. My grandpa saw them making this cut, or at least part of it. Evidently they set up some kind of monitor nozzle similar to the ones employed in those days to wash away hillsides for placer mining operations. Water is piped downhill to build up a head and released through a nozzle at high pressure. This is enough to erode sediment and basically the sediment of the glacial deposit was blasted away with water to create a bench for the rail line. I don’t know what their source of water was but I would guess it was the Baker River.

The water and sediment from the operation ran straight into the Skagit river and I remember my dad commenting that my grandpa had said that he thought it couldn’t have been good for the river. I don’t know exactly what year this would have been. I would guess it would have been in the early 1900’s. The railroad history here is fairly well documented but I am not completely familiar with it. If you look over the guard rail in this area, you can see another road or grade below Highway 20. I have been told that this is the old railroad grade.

Milepost 91

Milepost 91 is near Jackman Creek. One September my grandpa and great uncle went Down Below to what is now known as Sedro-Woolley to get flour for the wintery. I don’t know what year it was but it was in the days before there was a road or probably even a railroad since everyone used shovel nosed canoes to travel up and down the valley via the Skagit River. My family bought their canoes from an Indian carver they knew. My grandpa, a blacksmith by trade, also made some tools for carving canoes for this guy. 

The story goes that, as my grandpa and great uncle were poling back upstream past the mouth of Jackman Creek, fully loaded with four barrels of flour, each weighing one hundred pounds apiece, something spooked the pink salmon or humpies that were spawning in Jackman Creek, causing them all to run out of the creek into the river. There were so many fish that the force of them coming out of Jackman Creek all at once, tipped the canoe over. The story doesn’t go beyond that but one can imagine some pretty strong expletives and a struggle to, one, keep from drowning and, two, retrieve the winter’s flour supply which probably represented not only a big chunk of the winter’s food but also a significant amount of money. They both survived and, as far as I know, retrieved the flour.

On an interesting aside, the term “Down Below” is local vernacular here for the lower end of the valley that I suspect might be unique to this area and also may stretch back nearly to the time of European contact, possibly even further. I have heard people who live Down Below and have long family histories there, back to the canoe days, also use the term. I also suspect that in the days when the Skagit River was the main means of transportation in the valley, “Down Below” referred to a spot on the river or a boundary of some kind on the river. I have never heard “Down Below” used in reference to the towns of Hamilton or Lyman. It has always been Sedro-Woolley or the towns “down below” Sedro-Woolley. Several times people who have only lived here recently have poked fun at me for using the term “Down Below” instead of the more generic “down valley”. At least a few of these people I know go to other countries and show deep respect for the cultures they find. Funny how this little bit of local culture would make them so uncomfortable.  

Back to Jackman Creek. Just east of Jackman Creek on the north side of Highway 20 is Van Horn, a small community that never quite made it to the status of a town. The road that serves this area still bears the name Van Horn Lane. The large rectangular building fronting Highway 20 here was a store at one time. A shake mill operated in Van Horn for many years.

 The head of Jackman Creek is just on the other side of a ridge from the middle reaches of Diobsud Creek. In about 1993, I went into some small ponds on the Diobsud Creek side of this ridge. There is a fish passage barrier somewhere in the area of the boundary of private timber land and U.S. Forest Service land. In the area above this barrier on USFS land, Jackman Creek was loaded with westslope cutthroat (Oncorhynchus clarki lewisi). They were so numerous I could easily spot them from the bank in probably a mile of stream or more and I caught a nice mess of them on my way out. I went into same ponds along the same route in about 2004 and there was not a fish in creek in that area. I didn’t see any and I didn’t even get a bite. They had all disappeared somewhere.

Just past the west end of Moen Road there are fields on either side of Highway 20. In the middle of the north fields off the west bound lane, there used to be a substation for Puget Sound Energy. It was torn down ten or fifteen years ago, apparently because it was no longer needed.

On the north side of Highway 20 almost at Milepost 92 and bordering the fields along the highway, there is a patch of woods with mostly small red alders (Alnus rubra) and infested with a heavy growth of Himalaya blackberries (Rubus discolor). This is a good example of how not to manage land.

In about 1993, most of the conifers were logged in this patch. The export market was high for Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and there was some very nice second growth Douglas-fir there. The hardwoods, mostly alder, were left. The area wasn’t replanted and the openings were too small for Douglas-fir to get re-established but the blackberries grew in quite well, preventing anything else from getting established.

Then, in about 2006, at the height of the export market for alder, the alder was logged. The blackberries, which were already well established, went crazy, covering much of the area. By now some small alders have managed to get established in what is now mostly a blackberry patch. As they grow, they will eventually shade out the blackberries and maybe some other tree species will get established but this will be a long process since Himalaya blackberries are very good at climbing up tree seedlings and saplings and pulling them down.

I don’t know if the owners expected the trees to seed back in on their own or if they even cared. Back in the days when it was allowable to burn slash, this might have given the forest an edge over the blackberries but nowadays different measures have to be taken like weed control and rapid replanting after timber harvest. I also don’t know about the weeds. I think they are here to stay. Even if you were to completely halt all human disturbance of the landscape, naturally occurring disturbances like fires, forest pathogens, floods, landslides etc. are going to create opportunities for non native weeds to spread.  

Milepost 92

The east end of Moen Road intersects Highway 20 near Milepost 92. The Jackman Creek Road takes off just past Milepost 92, near the top of the west side of Faber Hill.

The area around lower part of the Jackman Creek Road was logged and replanted in about 1993. The trees in the new forest are about 12 inches in diameter. There are Himalaya blackberries in many spots here as well but they haven’t taken over like the previously described area.

There were several old growth Douglas-firs in this logging unit that were left as wildlife trees. Most of these trees survived after the area was logged for quite a few years and a few are still alive today but most are dead snags now. These trees and snags should provide habitat for at least some species of wildlife and other organisms for many years to come. This example of forestry isn’t perfect but it is much better than the example given just previously.

Milepost 93

Milepost 93 is about halfway down the east side of Faber Hill. The old Faber Ferry landing is below the hill and is now a boat launch. There has been quite a bit of history written about the Faber Ferry but not much about the hill that I am aware of.

Faber Hill is a very dangerous spot and a lot of people have been killed here. Just after I got my driver’s license, the state was doing some work on the hill to try to keep a perennial spring from seeping through the pavement in the middle of the road near the top of the hill. Just before they laid down the asphalt layer, they laid down some kind of impermeable oil cloth to seal the road and quit for the night. A little later it rained and the local state trooper just about lost control of his vehicle on the impermeable cloth while traveling at a normal rate of speed. The cloth had made the road super slick. The road was closed until they could get the paper up or the asphalt down the next day, I don’t recall exactly which it was, paper up or asphalt down.

When I was in grade school, they also did a bunch of work on the lower part of the hill. There is a small stream here and the culvert for it, if there even was one, was perennially plugged, causing a small pond to form above the road (north side). This pond was completely covered with bright green, almost neon colored duckweed (Lemma spp.). This bright green pond was one of my favorite spots on the bus ride to school every day. I remember being quite fascinated with it and I got a really good look at it from the height of the school bus windows.

Just down the hill from this small stream there are a number of clay deposits on the north side of the road and a stream gulley that occasionally blows out. There has been work done here several times over the course of my lifetime to build riprap retaining walls to stabilize the saturated clay soils.

There are a few old growth Douglas-firs on the north side of the road at Faber Hill as well. These are about 4 to 5 feet dbh (diameter at breast height). If you look closely, you can see their trunks among the smaller trees of the new forest but the most telltale sign of their presence are their dead craggy tops, one of which can be seen from near the top of Faber Hill, standing out against the backdrop of the meadows on Sauk Mountain.

Between the bottom of the hill and the access road to the boat launch or old Faber Ferry, there is a flat on the north side of the highway. When I was a senior in high school, I put my dad’s 1964 Chevrolet pickup in the ditch here. Being teenage boys, no smarter than average teenage boys and just as squirrelly, a friend and I thought it would be fun to make the pickup go sideways in the flat on the way home from wrestling turnout. We had to walk and hitchhike back into Concrete to get another friend to pull us out.

Just past the flat at the bottom of Faber Hill the Sauk Store Road (county) intersects the south or west bound lane of Highway 20. This was the old original road. The new section of road has been rerouted on a straighter path to the north. The road rerouted sometime around the early 1960’s when I was very small or just before I was born.

I have now gone on for six pages in a word document and covered four miles. I will give readers a break and continue on in another post later.