Monte Cristo: A family-friendly hike into history

Take a hike into history in the Cascades this weekend. An
easy trail into the mountains will reveal remnants of a
long ago, isolated Old West town that was once the center
of a booming mining operation.

At the far end of the Mountain Loop Highway, in
Snohomish County, is the trailhead for the hike to Monte
Cristo, an abandoned turn-of-the-20th-century town located
in a steep valley in the rugged Cascade Mountains.

“I would classify [the trail] as easy, there’s
only 400 feet of elevation gain, it’s four miles long,”
said Matthew Speten, a volunteer interpreter working to
keep alive the history of Monte Cristo. “There is one
little intermediate section that’s a log crossing of the
river where the bridge is washed out [but] hundreds of
people come up on the weekend and a half to a third of
them are kids, coming with their parents.”

Speten tells the story of two miners, Joseph
Pearsall and Frank Peabody, who explored what they thought
was a ridge rich in gold and silver that they spotted from
the Index area in about 1879.

“They got financial backing from the East Coast and by
1893 they’d established the town, built the railroad from
Everett all the way up here and had a real, booming mining
town going,” explained Speten.

When you hike to Monte Cristo, at 2,800 feet, you
can close your eyes and imagine what the town must have
looked like nestled beneath peaks that rise to more than
7,000 feet.

“There were several hotels, there were hundreds of
people at that point, that included families. It wasn’t
just miners anymore. There were stores, a school set up,
it was a classic Old West town at that point,” said
Speten.

It worked, for a few years. But ultimately, Monte
Cristo failed. One big reason, says Speten, was that the
railroad was impossible to maintain.

“Because of avalanches. Because of the choice to
go through the Stillaguamish Canyon, avalanches constantly
blocked the road there and also floods. The river would go
from a trickle, or a ‘trout stream,’ as the eastern
engineers called it, to a raging torrent overnight during
the winter. It would block the tunnels up with rocks and
sticks and trees and it would wash the rails out over and
over every year,” Speten said.

Also, the concentration of ore decreased as miners
dug down, increasing the cost of the operation. The town
had a long, excruciating period of decline, with a few
revivals, before it was essentially abandoned for the
purposes of mining as the U.S. entered World War I.

A few attempts were made to turn it into a resort
town and it did well in the 1950s and 1960s, but
eventually, neglect, fire, floods, avalanches and heavy
snows made for the end of the town of Monte Cristo.

Today, hikers will find artifacts, including a
working, steel railroad turntable. “There is cable, ore
buckets, tools, brackets,” said Speten. “Especially for
the railroad [fans], there’s a lot of sheer plates, bolts,
tie rods, things like that and rails still laying around.”

And one remarkable remnant found at the end of a
ridiculously steep trail out of town.

“There’s an eight-foot diameter cast iron wheel
that was used as a brake for one of the trams up on top of
Mystery Ridge. How they got it there, I don’t know,”
remarked Speten, who just hiked to Monte Cristo last
weekend and says June would be a great time to visit.

“Most of it was under snow, but the next month or
so, before the brush grows up, is a great time to wander
around Monte Cristo because you can see stuff,” advised
Speten

But Speten warns us to leave things where they
lie. He says one guy was actually prosecuted for stealing
an artifact from Monte Cristo.

The trailhead to Monte Cristo is located off the Mountain
Loop Highway, which you can get to from Granite Falls.

(Outside photograph: Boston American Mining Company
buildings, Monte Cristo, Washington, 1912. Photographer
unknown. From the University of Washington Libraries.
Special Collections Division.)