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In February 1910 a monstrous blizzard stranded two trainloads of passengers high in the Cascade Mountains. An army of the Great Northern Railway's dedicated men worked round the clock to rescue the trains, which were perched precariously on the edge of a steep precipice near Wellington, Washington. The passengers waited for days as the drifts grew higher and food and coal dwindled. But as the storm raged on, efforts to escape proved futile. The passengers panicked. Then the unthinkable occurred: a colossal avalanche a half mile wide tumbled from the pinnacles, sweeping the trains and their sleeping passengers down the mountainside. Here is the tale of the deadliest avalanche and one of the worst rail disasters in U.S. history.
Excerpt:
Prologue: A Late Thaw, Summer 1910
The last body was found at the end of July, twenty-one weeks after the avalanche. Workmen clearing debris from the secluded site, high in the cool, still snow-flecked Cascades, discovered the deteriorating corpse in a creek at the mountainside's base. Trapped under piles of splintered timber, the dead man had to be Archibald McDonald, a twenty-three-year-old brakeman, the only person on the trains not yet accounted for.
Continue reading . . .
Advance praise for The White Cascade
"What a wild-eyed, horrific, brilliantly written story Gary Krist tells in The White Cascade. You almost feel like you're a Great Northern Railway passenger in 1909, coping with the blizzard-from-hell. Jack London would be proud of this riveting nonfiction accomplishment."
—Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at Tulane University and author of The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast
"The White Cascade brilliantly recreates one of those terrifying moments when human ingenuity runs up against the fierce power of nature. Gary Krist doesn't simply describe the Great Northern Railway Disaster. He takes you up the mountainside, settles you into the trapped Pullman car, and makes you feel the fear closing in around you. That's storytelling at its finest."
—Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
"It is always a great gift when someone tells a long forgotten story, but it is especially so when the drama is this astonishing, and the writer this talented. Gary Krist weaves a spider web of a tale, drawing the reader in, until they feel as though they too are a passenger on Seattle 25, trapped in one of the world's most dangerous places, in one of history's most savage storms. The White Cascade will keep you up at night, and not just from its unsettling end—you won't be able to put it down."
—Susan Casey, author of The Devil's Teeth
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