A little before Highway 2 starts to ascend Stevens Pass, there is a small parking area which marks Deception Falls, so named because the falls are somewhat hidden.
A piece of history was established near here. As the sign says: Near this site at 11:30 at night, on January 6, 1893, a laborer drove the last spike completing the transcontinental Great Northern Railway. As the echo of hammer on steel faded away, 1,816 miles of new track linked Puget Sound to St. Paul, Minnesota.
Great Northern's founder, James J. Hill, built the line without any government aid. A hard taskmaster, he insisted in the summer of 1892 that crews link eastern and western rails "somewhere up there in the Cascades, before winter sets in."
Over one thousand men worked to complete the line in these
rugged mountains. Winter arrived, but they kept working in
driving rain and snowstorms until that cold night when the
crew from the east met the crew from the west.
This photo of the last spike ceremony was a re-enactment the next day due to the wrong light on the day. Note the bright lower left corner is the sun - yet again the lighting was wront.
About halfway up the hill you can see a horizantal line in the trees. This, I suspect, is the location of the railway line. This line is still in use, though the actual crossing of the mountain is now done with the second longest rail tunnel in North America. The water is Deception Creek, heading towards the Skykomish River.
Not a bad flow of water for September
The foreground bridge is for pedestrians. The background bridge is actually Highway 2; the falls are the far side of that bridge.
Skykomish River