Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Vol. VI

Highway 20 (North Cascades Highway) Milepost 106

Milepost 106 on Highway 20 is in the middle of the town of Marblemount which I covered in the last post. About a quarter mile west of the Community Hall/Fire Station/east boundary of town, the road goes down a small hill. This is one of the first places the river comes over the Highway during floods. There is a back way around it up either Emerald Lane or Honeysuckle Lane and then under the power lines and out Ranger Station Road.

This is also the spot where, according to my dad, Olson Creek used to flow into the Skagit River. If you know what you are looking at, you can see old stream channels and swales here that were formerly the bed of Olson Creek. It now meets the river on the other side of town and downstream of the Cascade River.

In the fall of 1983, just after I graduated from high school, some friends and I were snagging humpies (pink salmon or Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) in the Skagit near here (snagging or jigging for salmon was, and still is, illegal by the way). On the way back from the river I stepped on a nail, driving it into the bottom of my foot. This necessitated a visit to the emergency room in Sedro-Woolley where the wound was cleaned and flushed out and a tetanus booster administered.

That evening, or maybe the next day, I had to go back down to Concrete. I was trying to get back a Sammy Hagar tape (Standing Hampton) that I had lent a friend who was living with his grandma. This guy was out of town so I stopped by his grandma’s house to see if she might know where my tape was. She met me on the porch and about the first thing she said after “Hi” was, “I heard you hurt your foot”. Understand that I hadn’t seen or talked to this lady all summer long. Word gets around fast in a small community. I didn’t get my tape back.

Just a little farther west of the low spot in the road and the former Olson Creek channel is the site of the house of some friends. I remember this house burning down one morning when we were kids. The school bus I rode would have ordinarily have picked up the kids who lived there but they were all outside in their bedclothes with bedding in hand looking at the house which was a solid mass of orange flame. It was awful. Fortunately everyone got out okay.  

Several hundred yards farther east there is a house that appeared to made of vertical logs. Dad told me that the guy who built it went to one of the local sawmills (there used to be a lot of them) and picked through the scraps to get half-round boards of a uniform width. In those days the first and last cuts in on a log were thrown away or burned as waste because they were-half round. This guy built his house out of the half-round mill scraps. The house was painted a pale pastel yellow that wasn’t very flattering but I always thought the overall architecture of the house was pretty interesting. I have seen a few similar houses but not many. Some years back some people bought the house and put a bat and board exterior on it.

About a quarter mile farther east along Highway 20 there is a house with a man buried in its front yard, if my dad is to be believed. My dad called this man Skiyou Jack and dad had a story about him that, though it was kind of funny from a certain point of view, wasn’t very flattering. I have never told anyone else this story and I don’t think I will ever share it because we all have problems and there had to have been more to the man’s life than one unflattering story.

There was a tree, I don’t remember exactly what it was beyond that it wasn’t native to the Pacific Northwest, in the front yard of the house and Skiyou Jack was buried under that tree. Ten or fifteen years ago whoever was living in the house at the time took the tree down and removed the stump. Evidently they didn’t find any bones or, if they did, they didn’t talk about it. The soils here are pretty acidic so there might not have been any bones to find. I doubt any of the occupants over the last decades ever even knew about Skiyou Jack.  

Another hundred yards or so east along the highway, one will see a stand of Douglas-fir with the largest trees at maybe 40 to 50 feet tall and 12 to 18 inches dbh (diameter at breast height). This is a Christmas tree farm that got away. The trees were planted in a field there when I was probably in my teens but they never got harvested and so continued to grow. They appear to be just another forest until one looks and sees that there is nothing there but Douglas-fir and they are all roughly the same size.

Milepost 107

Milepost 107 is just east of the feral Christmas tree plantation. About a quarter mile, or maybe a little farther, east of Milepost 107, Emerald Lane intersects the west bound lane of the highway. Emerald Lane was built when I was 16 or 17 years old for access to a development. There were no houses in this area at that time, it was all woods.

Emerald Lane leads back to the Seattle City Light transmission right-of-way that, in this area, is also the old railroad grade, and across this to the old air strip that Harlan Blankinship built. As I previously stated, the airstrip is now overgrown where there aren’t houses and lawns. I remember me and a friend of mine racing our dad’s pickups along Emerald Lane just after it was built and before it was named. This was while I was still in high school. I also had a very bad experience deer hunting at the air strip before there were any houses back there. When the river floods, Emerald Lane or Honeysuckle Lane are the only way to get into Marblemount via the road, which is the old railroad grade, under Seattle City Light’s transmission lines.

A few yards east of Emerald Lane off the west bound lane of the highway a flat topped house sits just above the river. This house is remarkable in that, since it was built, to my knowledge, it has never flooded even though it only sits 10 or 15 feet above the river. There is a wide flood plain on the side of the river opposite this house and this flood plain is at a lower elevation than the house so all of the water goes over there during floods.

A little less than a quarter mile farther east, if one looks closely as you pass by, off the east bound lane on the river bank, there is one of the few remaining old growth Douglas-firs in the valley bottom. It is at least 5 feet dbh or more. It has a hard lean straight out into the river. I’m guessing this is why it was never cut. In the days the timber of this size was being cut, they were still using axes and crosscut saws and there was probably no way to keep it out of the river when it fell, at which point, they would lose it, and the several hours of very hard work that it took to cut it down. So it was left.  

About another quarter mile farther east, off the west bound lane there is a small house that now has trees growing through it. When I was a kid, I nice old couple named Carl and Lucille Estes lived here. They operated a small farm between this house and a small field, maybe a couple of acres in size, another quarter mile farther east. I don’t remember exactly what all the different types of animals were that they had but I definitely remember chickens, goats and a milk cow.

It was obvious that these folks weren’t wealthy but Lucille always seemed to have enough set by to buy a couple magazine subscriptions from me every year during the magazine sales drive when I was in grade school. I think the sales were a national cooperative thing between schools and big magazines to teach kids sales skills and work ethic. All of the subscriptions were for large national publications.

Milepost 108

Less than a quarter mile east of Milepost 108 off the east bound lane is Estes’ old field. There are some houses and other buildings here now that weren’t here when Estes’ owned it and a row of tree has been planted between the field and the highway. Directly across the highway from the field is Honeysuckle Lane.

Honeysuckle Lane leads back to the Seattle City Light power transmission right-of-way and old railroad grade on top of a bench or terrace. The road leads across the right-of-way and up to another bench but it is now gated at the bottom of the hill.

My dad was born in a cabin that stood near the intersection of Honeysuckle Lane and the right-of-way. The road wasn’t called Honeysuckle Lane at the time and it led through empty forest land. The name Honeysuckle Lane was given, probably to add appeal to the area, when the land was developed for houses. Ironically, dad ended up working for Seattle City Light for many years on the power transmission right-of way. One of my aunts, named Betsy, is buried up there. She died of diptheria when she was nine years old. There is more on this place in my post, Walking the Dog of June 5, 2013.

About half a mile east of Milepost 108 Highway 20 crosses Diobsud Creek. There is a field beginning to become overgrown with trees and a blue-gray Victorian farm house on the west side of Diobsud Creek off the east bound lane. There is a small scar on my left eyebrow where it joins the nose that I got from falling off the porch of that house. When I was younger, we knew a lot of people who lived in that house and I spent a lot of time in it, though it has now been 30 years or more since I have been in it.

Diobsud is an Indian word. Dad always said it means “foaming water”. I have heard other people say that Diobsud was the name of a chief who lived near there but the real Native word for the stream, which was not Diobsud, did mean “foaming water”. I have also heard that Diobsud means other things as well. No matter what the name was, I have always liked the meaning “foaming water” because this is a stream where you can pretty reliably find foam where the stream flows out of a constriction at the valley wall.

None of the people I have talked to who still understand Salish were familiar with the word Diobsud. The closest term anyone could come up with means “the other side of the river” or something like that. I wonder if the word was actually a term used only by the local band or sub-band of Skagits who lived in the area. There were quite a few separate bands along the river, each with its own name, and I would think, possibly with their own colloquialisms and local place names. These people collectively became known as Skagits at some point later, probably under a treaty of some kind. I’m not an expert on that history but it doesn’t sound like a very good time for Indian people when the white people moved in, though many were able to and did continue to live in the area.  

The proper way to pronounce this name, as Native speakers did, as per my dad who heard Native speakers say it is: Die-oh-b-sud. People who grew up here usually say Die-oh-b-see or Die-oh-p-see. People who didn’t grow up here rarely get it right. I am sure it will morph into something unrecognizable to the original before too many years pass. Such is the way with some words but it is also kind of a shame to lose this little bit of history so unique to the place.

If you look upstream on the creek at the west side of the bridge you will see a riprap dike that is now so overgrown with trees that it is hard to recognize. A large hole was made in this riprap dike just upstream of the bridge to allow a side channel to flow through.

When I was a kid, they had trouble keeping the creek under bridge where it was supposed to be. This was because they made the bridge too small for the stream channel. To fix the problem, they made the riprap dike on the west side of the creek. The creek promptly found a way around the upper end of the dike, during a spring flood, I believe. Now the dike was in the way of the stream flowing back into it’s original channel so it flowed across the road and the field and I think even the Victorian house that I previously mentioned. The breach was made in the dike so the creek would flow back under the bridge and it has been that way ever since, about 45 years or so.

Diobsud Creek in the area of the Highway 20 bridge continues to be a problem. When the original bridge was built here, the engineers made it too small, probably because they came up and did their measurements and calculations in the summer or at least when the weather was nice and Diobsud Creek  was at low flow conditions, not during flood stage when high stream flows filled the stream banks to capacity. The bridge being too narrow creates a constriction which causes the stream above the bridge to store sediment and meander all over the place for quite some distance upstream.

There is a field on the east side of the bridge on the north side of the road that has been eroded away to almost nothing. This field has lost at least an acre, probably more. There used to be a pretty healthy fringe of trees between the field and the creek. The creek undercut some of these trees and they fell in and the stream migrated east around the root wads, causing even more trees to fall in, pushing the creek into the field and preventing it from flowing back into its original channel.

The land owner was not allowed to cut or remove the trees that were causing the stream migration through his field and towards the highway. This is a good example of what I call environmentalist dogma at work.

Logs or large woody debris are generally a good thing in a stream. Large woody debris helps prevent erosion, stores sediment and creates lots of habitat for fish and other aquatic organisms. Over the years, a lot of logs have been removed from streams to the detriment of said fish and organisms. Therefore, some very strong rules have been adopted to prevent people from cutting or removing large woody debris from streams. This is what happened on the east side of Diobsud Creek.

However, the problem here was, first, the bridge is too small, causing the stream to migrate more than usual and second, in this situation, the fallen trees were actually increasing erosion. Usually when a tree falls into a stream the resulting log then somewhat armors the bank it fell in from and prevents further erosion by preventing the full force of the water from further hitting the bank. On some occasions, however, the stream cuts back behind the fallen tree. In this situation, the stream is prevented from reentering its channel by the newly fallen log and continues to erode away from it. I have seen this happen under natural conditions in several streams that I have surveyed over the years. These streams sometimes moved hundreds of yards, mowing down forests as they went. This is the situation that existed on the east end of the Diobsud Creek bridge.

Because the rules prevented cutting or removing the logs and the dogma says that large woody debris is good, no matter what, Diobsud Creek continued to erode away from the channel that went under the bridge. It was moving through the field towards the highway. If it had reached the highway and washed it out, then there would have been a lot of asphalt, and oil and grease in the creek and the river. Fixing the highway would have created a huge mess and a lot of sediment in the stream along with more oil and more grease, definitely a lot more environmental damage than would have resulted from cutting a few logs out of the creek and maybe a little riprap on the bank. I agree that large woody debris, as a general rule, is good to have in streams. Situations like this are the exception to that rule. A few years back the land owner was finally granted permission to cut a path for the creek to flow through the log jam rather than continuing towards the road. ‘Nuff said.  

About half a mile east of the Diobsud Creek bridge there is a sharp corner. The place on this corner is where I grew up and the home field that I erstwhile hayed and pastured the cows on during the winter. There is an old house here, built during the Great Depression. More on that later.

This spot is a nice scenic pastoral place with a field with a backdrop of mountains. Except for the six years I spent in the U.S. Navy, I lived here from the time I was about a month old until I was 46.

Always there is the sound of water, Diobsud Creek to the north and the Skagit to the south, rustling at low flows and roaring at flood stage. This was probably my first memory of the place. When my sister went away to college she found she didn’t sleep well. She finally figured out that playing a tape with background water flowing was the ticket to good night’s sleep for her. The background water sound is punctuated with various smells and wildlife sounds, coyotes and birds, the most striking being the Swainson’s thrush in the summer and the winter wren year round.  

I’m sure to the average person driving by, the place looks idyllic, depending on how they view rustic buildings some of which are rather run down. The place has many layers of memories for me. Some good, some bad. The scene of a spring green pasture with cows grazing peacefully is one I enjoy. But I also have memories of worry and struggling, bone tired, with a hollow gut trying to get a hay crop in with old worn out equipment and dark clouds that looked like rain rolling over the mountains towards the field full of hay. Then the euphoric feeling when the hay for the year was safe in the barn. There were lot of happy birthdays and holidays and good times with family and friends. Almost all of the pets I ever had died here and are buried here too.

Milepost 109

Milepost 109 is about in the middle of our home pasture. A guy I knew for quite a few years and also worked with for a few years was killed here in a car crash last summer. Mom heard the car crash but it wasn’t very loud so she thought everything was okay until a guy who had seen it happen in front of him came knocking on the door for her to call 911. A very sad story, the guy killed in the crash had just retired a few months before.

About a hundred yards east of Milepost 109, Diobsud Creek Road intersects the west bound lane of the highway. This is a U.S. Forest Service Road and it goes through a piece of property we call the Smith Place after Herman and Peggy Smith.

Herman and Peggy used to live here next to the highway. Their house burned down many years ago and the house site is now overgrown with alder and maple. There are a few apple trees that are rapidly being shaded out and there used to be a Ponderosa pine there that died years ago. I got quite a few grouse out of those apple trees in my younger days. There is a big hole next to a large cedar tree where the house once stood. Peggy had a habit of keeping her wedding ring in the refrigerator and, because of this, it was one of the few things that survived the fire.

The Diobsud Creek Road was actually supposed to follow the property line between the Smith Place and the next place east, our Stump Farm. The story goes that whoever was charged with building the road laid it out and started building on the same day. The folks who owned the Smith Place at the time, named Ed and Doris Johnson had been gone for the day. When they left there was no road and no sign of a road. When they came back, it had already been pioneered through their property which made them quite angry. By that point it was evidently too late and the road stayed where it was.

Dad said that the guy who was the operated the caterpillar tractor to build the Diobsud Creek Road was quite a skilled operator. I don’t think he had anything to do with the decision on where to put the road. He just built roads where they told him to.

My parents owned the Smith Place with the Newbys who lived next door. When we were in our teens, Jim and Steve Newby and I had a little firewood cutting business here to earn some spending money. We used our dad’s powersaws and pickup trucks and gas. Mostly we cut alder which can be pretty dangerous. There we were with powersaws with no chain guards, no cutting chaps, no hard hats, felling and cutting alder.

Someone I once told about this thought it was irresponsible for our parents to turns us loose like that. This may be so. But then again, they also weren’t hovering over us directing our every move. They took a chance and trusted us and let us be relatively independent. We sold the wood green for $60 a cord, split and stacked in the customer’s wood shed.

Another hundred yards or so east of the Diobsud Creek Road is our Stump Farm. Mom and Dad bought this place from a man named Sam Barker. The Barkers moved away from Marblemount either before I was born or when I was very little. By a strange twist, I met one of Sam Barker’s grandson’s when I was stationed in Guam in the U.S. Navy. He was actually on my ship and worked in my division.

There is an old barn that is falling down at the Stump Farm with an old 1940’s Chrysler near it and an old Case tractor. I see a lot of people stop along the highway to take pictures of this scene.

There is an bare stem wall that extends away from the fallen barn towards the highway. This was where Barker’s house was. It burned down. I don’t know if the shed survived the fire or was built later.

A friend of my dad’s Roger Vail (who I mention in the  McMillan Park post of 9/29/2013) operated a car repair business out of here for a while. This is why the old Chrysler is still in the field. I call it a Chrysler because it is cobbled together from a number of interchangeable Chrysler parts. I think it has a Plymouth body but a Dodge transmission and drive train and maybe a few other parts from different, interchangeable Chrysler products.

I guess Roger never got around to fixing this car and whoever owned it didn’t come back for it or maybe Roger or dad ended up getting it in trade. Mom always thought it looks like unfinished business and an eyesore and wanted to get rid of it but I convinced her to leave it as a yard piece. As I said, a lot of people stop and take pictures of it, though I am sure there are a lot of folks who agree with my mom.  

When I was very small, dad raised weaner pigs and the pigpen was on the west side of the now fallen barn (it was still standing in those days). Dad had a boar, Smith and two sows, Punkinpuss and Susie.

Big hogs are dangerous and Smith was very big but quite gentle I understand. He would follow dad around and pester dad to scratch him. There are several stories about Smith treeing people in the barn. These folks weren’t familiar with Smith and when he came up to get scratched, they sought the highest area possible, usually the rafters in the barn. Then they would have to wait until dad showed up to feed, whereupon he would give Smith his scratches and tell the people it was all right to come down.  Punkinpuss and Susie were gentle as well. Being a small kid, I liked them just fine in the daylight but I had a lot of nightmares about them at night.

There was a big strawberry field at the Stump Farm when the folks first bought it. I don’t remember that but I do remember strawberry fields just east of the Stump Farm. These fields were subdivided and Douglas-fir, cedar and hemlock seeded in on the old strawberry fields. Some of these trees are easily foot and a half or more dbh (diameter at breast height) though they are still less than 50 years old.

About a quarter mile east of the Stump Farm, Highway 20 passes under Seattle City Light’s power transmission lines. It is at this point, the highway also intersects the old railroad grade. The railroad grade from here is almost a straight line from Windy Flats at Corkindale Creek and the transmission lines follow its route. Years ago there was some talk about rerouting the highway along the old railroad grade here to get rid of the many sharp corners one has to navigate along the present highway to travel between these two points. This would have bypassed Marblemount and it, in all likelihood, would have withered away. This reroute was strenuously opposed and Marblemount, such as it is, still exists today. Marblemount survived without the tracks before there was a highway but those were different times than today.

Enough for now, probably too much. More in the next post.