The Long Winter of the North Cascades Highway

By late October the Skagit River runs low and green, and the cottonwoods along its banks carry the dull gold of a year finishing. The road out of Newhalem climbs in long, patient bends — past the dam at Diablo, past the jade reach of Diablo Lake, into a canyon where the sun arrives late and leaves early. This is State Route 20, the North Cascades Highway, the northernmost road across the Washington Cascades, and one of the few crossings that closes outright every winter.

The closing is the oldest agreement on the mountain: the road gives way, and the mountain takes it back. In the summer the road works for the people who live along it, and they are glad of it. In November it stops working, and they do not fight it.

The road was finished in 1972, an act of nerve as much as engineering. It crosses the range at Rainy Pass and Washington Pass, where the granite rises in towers named Liberty Bell and the Early Winters spires, and the valleys narrow until there is barely room for the road and the river. The last stretch, through the country above Ross Lake, was cut into slopes that are less mountainside than avalanche path. In summer the slide chutes look like meadows. In winter they fill, and then they let go.

It was built to connect two countries. On the west, the Skagit side, the trees stand thick and the air smells of moss and rain. On the east, the Methow side, the mountains step back and the valley opens into dry grass, orchards, cattle, and long winter sunshine.

That is the reason for the gates. The highway does not close because the snow is deep, though it is deep. It closes because the snow is moving. Above the road, whole shoulders of the mountain load themselves all winter. A thaw, a wind, a new weight on top of the old, and the load lets go — a slide with enough force to carry the road, the guardrail, and any machine on it down into the valley. The crews who maintain the highway know every chute by the way it behaves. They also know that no road crew wins that argument forever.

An agreement with the mountains

So every year, when the weather turns, the state does what it does. The crews drive the mountain stretch one last time, checking the bridges and the culverts, making sure nobody is left beyond the gates. Then the gates are swung shut and locked. It is a schedule.

Between the gates, the road changes its nature. The plows stop, and the snow accumulates without interruption. The signs go under; the guardrails go under; the corners are rounded off until the highway is only a long white scar down the side of the mountain. By deep winter nothing moves on it by wheel.

The road is not abandoned, though. It becomes a trail — the closed pavement given over to skis and snowshoes. People go up between the gates because it is the only time a person can stand in the middle of a mountain highway and hear nothing built by people. The wind comes through the pass. The trees creak under their loads. Sometimes, at a distance, there is the boom of a slide on a slope no one is watching.

The crossing has two climates. The west approach carries the wet, heavy snow of the coast; the east approach carries the dry cold of the interior. The pass collects both, and the wind that comes with them. Snow falls by the foot. In the deepest places, a person walking the road in snowshoes cannot tell where the pavement ends and the ditch begins; the whole country is one level.

The towns at the end of the road

On both sides of the gates, the winter is lived by people who do not leave. Newhalem is a power company town, built for the people who dammed the Skagit. Its houses sit close together under the peaks, and in the cold months the town settles around its own machinery. The river runs through the turbines; the lights stay on; the road east of town leads only to the gate and the snow. The seasons are measured in the river and in the snowpack that feeds it.

On the east side, Mazama sits at the foot of the pass, a small valley place with a store at its heart. In summer everyone passes through. In winter the highway is a dead end, and the town returns to its own people. The talk at the store runs to snow depth, ice on the Methow, and how the detour treated somebody who had to make the long run to the west side.

The long run is a real thing. The closed pass adds a day to any errand across the mountains, and the valley people plan around it the way farmers plan around weather. A family that wants the wet side goes south and over one of the passes that keep their schedules all winter, and thinks nothing of it. There is no upset in the telling. It is the country they live in.

The people who stay do not experience the closing as a loss. The visitor sees a road shut; the resident sees the road's quiet season. The trucks stop. The out-of-state plates disappear. The canyon sounds like itself again, and a winter in one of these towns has a rhythm that a summer person never sees: short days, long dark, the stove going, the road known completely because it stops at the gate.

The return of the road

Then the light changes again. The days stretch; the snow settles and softens; the slides that have waited all winter run out their chutes. The crews come back to the gates with the machines that have sat since November. What they find is a road that needs excavating.

The pavement, where they reach it, is a record of everything the mountain dropped. The culverts are packed; the shoulders are somewhere under the fill. The road comes back into the world one cut at a time.

The pass opens when it opens, never on a date. Some years the gates come off in late April; some years the wait runs into May. The crews work through the heavy snow and the last storms of spring until the avalanche paths are quiet. Then one day the gates swing free, and the North Cascades Highway is a road again.

There is no ceremony. A few cars go through, one after another, and the highway is whole. The snow on the upper slopes will hold into July, but the road itself is summer business now. All through the warm months it will carry the traffic of a country crossing its own mountains, and the people who live along it will not talk much about the winter.

The road has an agreement with the mountains. In the summer it is a road. In the winter it is not. Each year the snow takes it, and each year the crews win it back with patient work and no illusions about who is in charge. The North Cascades Highway is the northernmost crossing of the Washington Cascades. It is also the most honest one, because every winter it admits that the mountains were here first.

Photos: Ron Clausen (CC BY-SA 4.0); SkagitRiverQueen (CC BY-SA 3.0); Laurel F (CC BY-SA 2.0)