Newcastle: Blazing an old trail on a hike into history

NEWCASTLE — On a recent warm, sunny day, an assortment of people from toddlers to retirees stood around chatting, decked out in hiking boots and colorful day packs to attend an unusual sort of christening at Lake Boren Park.

"This is a thank-you hike for the Issaquah Alps Trails Club, who gave us tools and a grant to help restore this trail, the May Creek Trail," said Jody Yoder, a board member of the Newcastle Trails group.

"It's a lovely hike," she added. "With a cake at the end."

From the park, our path would take us south and west, but we were also headed back in time. We were hiking along the old railroad bed of the Seattle & Walla Walla, Seattle's first "transcontinental" railroad.

"The railroad ran from near the site of the old Kingdome through here to upper Coal Creek," said Ralph Owen, the hike leader. Built by Seattle investors disappointed with the decision to base the Northern Pacific Railroad's western terminus in Tacoma, the line ended up running only 22 miles, but it led to Seattle becoming the dominant port city on Puget Sound. Coal had been discovered in Newcastle in 1863, and the extension of the railroad in 1878 up to the rich coalfields improved the coal transport via Seattle and its piers to the chief market in San Francisco.

We trooped south from the park along the grassy Waterline Trail, then crossed 89th Street and soon veered right to enter the forest. At times, the trail followed an obvious cut in the hillside, the route hacked out of the slope by the Chinese laborers who built this section of the railroad. Apple trees along the trail marked the location of an early homestead. We passed near where President Rutherford B. Hayes, along with General William Tecumseh Sherman, stopped on the train in 1880 at the rail siding at Bartrum Station, on their way up to visit the famous mines at Newcastle.

The current city of Newcastle was incorporated in 1994, and obtained May Creek Park from King County, but other priorities made the development of a trail system low on the city's to-do list. In 1999, a small band of local volunteers, who had a vision of preserving and establishing trails in the area, formed Newcastle Trails.

"The community had this great geography for a network of trails, and had public support for trails," said Gary Kampen, the president of the volunteer group.

So for the last three years, members of the trails group restored the May Creek Trail. Volunteers cleared impenetrable brush and hauled in wheelbarrows of wood chips to surface the often-muddy path. An Eagle Scout built a footbridge, with the help of other scouts and members of his church. Last October, three dozen volunteers worked more than 200 hours constructing a long staircase that gave access to the trail from the Windtree neighborhood.

On the inaugural hike, we stopped near where the railroad had crossed the May Creek Gorge over a huge wooden trestle that carried the trains to the south side of the canyon. The trestle was similar to the Wilburton trestle still standing near downtown Bellevue, but the May Creek span was even larger, by some accounts 238 feet high and 1,205 feet long.

An energetic older man ambled down the trail, coming to meet us from the nearby Windtree trailhead. Milt Swanson's father had worked in the coal mines, and he himself had worked as a mechanic during the latter days of the mines. He described how a locomotive had once fallen off the curved trestle into the canyon.

After the group hike and a piece of celebratory cake, there was time to return to Lake Boren Park to visit the pioneer cemetery on the hill west of the lake. The uneven, two-acre lawn is shaded by large conifers, and gravestones of many shapes and sizes dot the grass. The old markers bore the names of immigrants from Wales, England, Italy and Finland, who had come to work (and in some cases, die) in the mines located a few miles to the east.

White plastic flowers and a French surname marked a grave whose occupant lived only five months in 1899. Two elaborate gravestones marked members of the Lewis family, while other graves were identified only by stone cairns, their simple wooden markers destroyed in a 1921 forest fire. Miners died suddenly in the mines, overcome by toxic gases, or endured a slower death from black-lung disease. Members of their families died of diseases that spread throughout the company towns, while others survived to settle in the area.

Giles Velte, a Newcastle Trails volunteer, tells how the coal trains leaving Newcastle during the mining days used to put a passenger car on the first and last trains of the day to carry people from the mining community to Renton and beyond. He believes that people today want a connection to local history. "People need to be able to see what was old, and see what was there. It's important to know how we got to where we are."

Cathy McDonald is a free-lance writer who lives in Renton.