There are hectic days when the weather is nice, but I just can't get out for a long bike ride. That's when I jump on my mountain bike to ride some trails and finish up with a stop at a local grocery to pick up something for dinner — all in under an hour.
Part of the bicycle route is on an unassuming dirt path that veers into a second-growth forest behind some homes in neighboring Newcastle.
I never thought much about this dirt trail that dead-ends at a stairway high above May Creek until recently. That's when I found out that this is no ordinary dirt trail.
Seattle & Walla Walla
Merely 1.7 miles long, the May Creek Trail is the abandoned route of a narrow-gauge railroad of the 1800s that connected the lucrative old coalfields of old Newcastle to docks in Seattle. That commerce of shipping coal to San Francisco helped establish Seattle as the major port in the Pacific Northwest.
I've bicycled past those closed down coal mines before, but I didn't know the railroad grade still existed.
This railroad has an interesting history. The railroad was named the Seattle & Walla Walla. It only stretched 22 miles, nowhere near making a crossing of the Cascades to Walla Walla.
Largest trestle
After Seattle was jilted as a destination for a transcontinental railroad (it went to Tacoma), able-bodied and civic-minded Seattle residents volunteered in 1873 to build the first leg of this alternative railroad. They got as far as Renton. That's when the investors hired Chin Gee Hee and his Chinese crew to complete the line to the Newcastle coalfields.
Today, the May Creek Trail runs along the old railroad right of way; sometimes it's in the grade and at other times it runs up on the banks because the railroad bed gets flooded.
There's a spot where the trail dead-ends and heads up a stairway to some homes. That's one connection of the 120-foot-high railroad trestle (above) that stretched 800 feet to Kennydale in north Renton. Today there's no hint that anything was ever there, just an eerie emptiness. At the time, the railroad claimed it was the largest trestle in the US.
Old station site
Where the dirt path crosses a road there's a trail sign for Bartrum Station. This is the site of an old railroad station on the Seattle & Walla Walla, and the site where President Rutherford B. Hayes and Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman stopped on a railroad siding on their way to visit the coal mines.
The railroad was purchased in 1880 and renamed the Columbia and Puget Sound Railroad. Its history becomes murky after that. I'd like to find out when it finally fell out of use.
History
It's amazing that a simple dirt trail can have so much history. It dates back long before Newcastle was a suburb whose borders are blurred with identical communities. It goes back more than 100 years when it was a hardscrapple remote settlement where immigrants built railroads and worked in mines.
I'll never look at a dirt path through the forest in the same way again.
For more info, check out the HistoryLink article by Heather MacIntosh, Seattle Times travel article by Cathy McDonald, American Narrow Gauge Railroads by George Woodman Hilton, and Newcastle Trails.
For October, I'm still plugging along to achieve 4,000 miles on my bike in 2008. I rode 249 miles this month, bringing me to within 480 miles of my goal, or 3,520 miles for the year.
That means 240 miles a month for the last two months of the year. It doesn't seem like a daunting task, until I consider all the rain, cold, holidays and at least one head cold I'll have to endure.
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