Driving Deadhorse Point

Skirting the sheer cliffs makes my knuckles tingle. My right hand grips the armrest while my dominant left coils around a cold bottle of ginger beer, which I release into the cup holder only long enough to nibble on one of the stomach-soothing saltines cached in my lap. Up-up-up we go—like we’re climbing a roller coaster, except I’m far from amused. 

Rob and I have driven this stretch of what some people generously call a road dozens of times over the past decade in order to reach various trailheads for our carnivore research in the North Cascades. The trails begin near Hart’s Pass, a high-alpine oasis that provides panoramic, world-class views and ready access to the renowned Pacific Crest Trail. At more than 6,000 feet, Hart’s Pass is reportedly the highest site in Washington reachable by car.

On a recent August morning, our field trio (Rob, Alder, and I) departed Mazama and headed to Hart’s Pass Road (hereafter, The Road), ten miles of bumpy terror only a few minutes from our basecamp. Once we reached the pass, our plan was to spend two nights at the thinly treed, previously burned Meadows Campground—a perfect spot for stargazing and a great starting place for hikes to three of our wildlife cameras. But to get there, we’d have to survive Deadhorse Point, again.

A quick search on the Internet gives you a glimpse of The Road’s alarming reputation. A writer for Huffington Post identifies this rocky route as one of the riskiest in the world, and a regional law firm’s website claims it’s by far the most dangerous road in Washington. “Trust us,” they warn. “You do not want to get in a car accident on Hart’s Pass.” Exactly.

You’d think I’d be used to The Road after all these years, and to some extent, I am. I no longer dread the drive for days in advance, nor do my eyes automatically slam shut when I see another car approaching from the opposite direction—both drivers frantically assessing who has the better chance of pulling over without falling into the abyss. Still, the stories play through my mind like a series of stress dreams come true.

The tale of our friend diving from the seat of his snowmobile just in time to watch the rumbling sled disappear down an avalanche slide into the deep maw of the canyon. He recovered the machine’s carcass two days later from below. 

Rob and me racing down from Hart’s Pass on a spare tire (did I mention the sharp stones surfacing the road are infamous for causing flats?) as smoke from the tragic 2015 Twisp River fire choked the Methow Valley below. We finally arrived safely in Mazama to find that many residents had already evacuated, while others lined up in a panic for gas. “There’s only one safe way out,” we were told by a Forest Service employee who watched anxiously from the ranger station parking lot as flames approached his property in the distant hills. Later that evening, a heroic mechanic in a nearby town changed our tire against the backdrop of blackened grass abutting his still-open shop.

The next year, we faced off on multiple occasions with a fearless backhoe making repairs to The Road, which had been blocked by a huge boulder amid a giant landslide.

And so on.

You might reasonably wonder why The Road exists at all; what could have inspired such a crazy endeavor? The answer, not surprisingly, is money.

Like many parts of the West, the Methow Valley had become a magnet for miners by the turn of the last century. Note the following passage from a fascinating book titled The North Cascadians, by JoAnn Roe:

In 1892, Alex Barron located a really valuable strike in Hart’s Pass. Like hundreds of other prospectors, Barron was panning the streams, working his way eastward from Ruby Creek. The alert minor noticed that, as he got father upstream, some of the gold seemed different from placer gold, coarse and of a different color. He reasoned that it had come from higher up in the mountain and sank exploratory holes along a 500-yard stretch. His persistence paid off with a strike right near the surface. Smitten more with the thrill of discovery them with the day-to-day work of mining gold, Barron promptly sold his claim to Eureka mining company of Anacortes for reported $50,000-$80,000. The company eventually extracted more than $300,000 in gold from this one claim. 

Next, enter entrepreneur Colonel Thomas Hart, who came to the pass in the 1890s and decided to build a road. Roe’s account continues:

He hired Charles Ballard, later a key owner of the Azurite Mine, to lay out a trail from Robinson Creek to Slate Creek on the opposite side of the mountain. It was not a trail for the faint-hearted. In one place the road literally was hung on the side of a sheer cliff by iron pins fastened into the face of the rock for eighteen feet, with planks placed on the pins to form a roadway. To the canyon below there was a sheer drop of 1000 feet. This hair-raising section became known as Deadhorse Point after a pack horse slipped on the plankway and tumbled over into the chasm, pulling an entire pack train with him.

I think of those poor horses every time we round that curve—their lack of choice in the matter, the eerie silence in their wake. Deadhorse Point is also where our friend lost his snowmobile. It could have easily been him.

Granted, The Road is much sounder now than it was in the day of Barron, Ballard, and Hart, especially once it’s cleared for recreationists in summer. But I breathe a little easier when we arrive at Hart’s Pass, grateful to be alive and where the wolverines are.

Photo: Woodland Park Zoo