Ninety-six people died here in the space of a few minutes, and afterwards the railway changed the name of the place.
Wellington was a small unincorporated railroad community on the Great Northern Railway in northeastern King County, Washington, founded in 1893 in the Cascade Range at the west portal of the original Cascade Tunnel under Stevens Pass.
At the end of February 1910 a severe blizzard settled over the area for nine days. Up to a foot of snow fell every hour, and on the worst day eleven feet came down. Two trains out of Spokane bound for Seattle, one carrying passengers and one carrying mail, were trapped at the depot. Snow plows were already at Wellington and more were sent, but they could not get through the accumulation or the repeated slides along the stretch of track between Scenic and Leavenworth.
Late on 28 February the snow stopped and turned to rain, driven by a warm wind. Just after one in the morning on 1 March, during a thunderstorm, a lightning strike broke a slab loose from the side of Windy Mountain. A mass of snow ten feet high, half a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide came down toward the town. A forest fire had recently burned over the slopes above, leaving very little standing to slow it.
It took both trains. Ninety-six people were killed, and it remains the deadliest avalanche in United States history.
The community was later renamed Tye.
HistoryLink, the Washington state history project, keeps the full account in an essay by Greg Lange, and its title does the memorial work without embellishment: a train disaster at Wellington killed 96 on 1 March 1910. If you walk the old right of way at Stevens Pass, that is the ground it happened on.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
