Palouse to Cascades Trail bypass opens in Western WA after flood damage

PALOUSE TO CASCADES TRAIL, 5 MILES EAST OF RATTLESNAKE LAKE – Like a scene out of “Train Dreams,” railroad workers toiled on the steep slopes of the Cascades foothills in the 1910s to carve a path for the iron horse out of an unforgiving landscape. They cut down trees, laid brick, piled up gravel and forged a flat ribbon along a rugged hillside so steam engines could ply the route between Chicago and Puget Sound via Snoqualmie Pass.

Those legions of laborers could perhaps have scarcely imagined their blood, sweat and tears in service of the ruthless pace of commerce would eventually become a publicly owned trail for more leisurely pursuits like hiking and biking – and that their handiwork would endure for more than a century.

“A lot of people assume if it was built for the railroad, it’s indestructible,” said Washington State Parks Cascade Foothills Area Construction and Maintenance Project Supervisor Chuck Hamilton on the trail during a July site visit.

Six months earlier, time caught up to soil first packed tight during the Teddy Roosevelt administration, when days of drenching rain from a series of atmospheric rivers saturated a section of the Palouse to Cascades Trail. The unrelenting precipitation turned the ground underneath into a slurry, and the trail tumbled downhill, leaving an 80-foot gap on the stretch between North Bend and Snoqualmie Pass.

Barely six months later, the trail is back open just in time for the summer hiking and biking season with a temporary bypass. How did Washington State Parks respond so quickly – and what’s the long-term future of one of the Seattle area’s most cherished rail-to-trail conversions?

Short term: Emergency permitting, donations

The ripple effects of the December 2025 floods in Western Washington continue to be felt long after the waters have receded. Backcountry trails in the Cascades remain inaccessible due to roads swallowed by rivers with no prospect in sight for repairs.

The land managers responsible for the Palouse to Cascades Trail, however, have already found a way forward. Over the winter, state parks began receiving inquiries from bikepackers and long-distance cyclists planning spring and summer cross-state and cross-country rides for which this section of the trail is a linchpin to avoid a dangerous detour onto Interstate 90.

In September, a national delegation rode the Palouse to Cascades Trail from Cle Elum, Kittitas County, to Seattle as part of an advocacy campaign on behalf of the larger Great American Rail-Trail that will eventually run from La Push, Clallam County, on the Pacific Coast to Washington, D.C. That recent experience made the washout all the more poignant for trail advocates.

“We were devastated to learn of the damage after having just been out there in the early fall last year,” said Brandi Horton, vice president for communications of Rails to Trails Conservancy, the national nonprofit behind the coast-to-coast trail concept.

And that kind of attention from Washington, D.C., was felt in Olympia.

“When you have national organizations reaching out to state parks and asking what’s the timeline for reopening, it does put a little extra pressure on state parks to act quickly and find some solutions,” said Washington State Parks Trails program manager Paul Knowles during a July site visit.

With nearly 80,000 visitors last year, the King County stretch is the most heavily trafficked section of the Palouse to Cascades Trail. Knowles said that with such high visitation, the agency reasoned hikers and bikers were going to make their way around any closure – a dangerous prospect on an active landslide site.

The risk motivated the agency’s leadership to declare the workaround as an “emergency project.” In Knowles’ estimation, that decision slashed the internal review, approval and permitting time from up to 12 months to a mere two-and-a-half.

At the same time, the Washington State Parks Foundation stepped in with $35,000 to cover the construction cost. “The legislative sessions aren’t timed to respond to these short-term needs,” said the foundation’s executive director John Floberg.

In turn, Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance found room in its busy trail-building schedule to take on the job. After 11 working days, a 350-foot single-track trail emerged through the woods just upslope from the washout and opened to the public on June 5.

Long term: Expensive fix, preventive maintenance

Built with a mixture of softball-sized rocks and 1.25-inch gravel, the bypass trail follows the natural contour of the hillside, which will make it less prone to erosion and landslides than the old railroad bed.

“This is not great terrain for building a railroad – steep slopes, lots of precipitation, heavy snowfall, water having to rush down the mountainside,” Hamilton said.

While early 20th-century engineers and manual laborers devised adequate construction techniques for decades of locomotives, that 110-year-old infrastructure is increasingly prone to failure. An engineering firm commissioned by state parks studied the trail earlier this year and found two historic culverts west of the recent washout are also at risk of collapsing if they are not repaired in the next two to five years. During the site visit, state parks staff said the culverts have received minimal maintenance over the last 50 years since train service ended and the agency inherited the railroad right of way.

A permanent fix for the washed-out section now served by the bypass could cost anywhere from $2.5 to $7.5 million, Knowles estimated, depending on whether the repair plan recommends a culvert or a bridge. Making that decision, meanwhile, will cost at least another $150,000 in geotechnical assessments and engineering designs. All of which costs money that state parks doesn’t have.

“We’re tasked with maintaining miles and miles of historic railroad infrastructure,” said Knowles. “It’s an expensive undertaking.”

Neither Washington State Parks Director Diana Dupuis nor commission Chair Holly Williams would commit to a timeline for either the trail repair or the preventive maintenance, noting the need to secure funding from the legislature. “Washington State Parks and the state in general are in a really difficult budget climate,” Williams said.

The cash-strapped agency was forced to make cuts earlier this year, but Dupuis insists the Palouse to Cascades Trail is a priority. “We know that the public eye is on this, and we want to get it back as soon as we possibly can,” she said.

Other possible sources of funding include federal disaster aid and grants from Puget Sound Energy, whose transmission lines run along the trail. During the March lowland snowstorm, crews were forced to hike 10 hours to reach the Twin Falls substation because of the trail closure.

“It’s very important to our communities and to us to partner in any way we can to find a solution for this access way,” said PSE Vice President of Gas and Electric Operations Ryan Murphy.

Ultimately, the challenges facing the Palouse to Cascades Trail are a microcosm of what the state parks system is facing as natural disasters and failing infrastructure have closed other state park amenities in recent years, from the cabins at Cama Beach Historical State Park to West Beach parking spots and trail segments at Deception Pass State Park.

“We’re trying to maintain a 113-year-old park system that is impacted by an ever-changing climate as older parks and the infrastructure underneath them reach the end of their lifespan,” Dupuis said.