Sal on I-90 Eastbound: Seattle to Ellensburg
By WithBy
Categories: Society & Culture, Places & Travel
The history, geology, and stories along I-90 eastbound from Seattle to Ellensburg, timed to the drive exit by exit. Spoken by Sal and Peggy.
39 episodes indexed on PodSearch.
Recent episodes
- Exit 109 — Ellensburg, Business Loop
Sal: Between exits one hundred nine and one hundred ten. Sal: Canyon Road is the interstate's business loop into Ellensburg. Peggy: Canyon Road. The canyon is real; it's just down the road. Sal: Near Ellensburg, I-90 meets I-82, one of the handful of major junctions on its whole run across the…
- Exit 106 — Ellensburgh, Rodeo, Washoe
Sal: Between exits one hundred six and one hundred nine. Sal: Ellensburg began with a trading post. John Alden Shoudy arrived in the Kittitas Valley in 1871 and bought a small post from A. J. Splawn called Robber's Roost, the valley's first business aside from the early trading among Native…
- Exit 101 — Lights, Evenings Only
Sal: Between exits one hundred one and one hundred six. Sal: Thorp sits at the narrow west end of the Kittitas Valley, where the high forests of the Cascades give way to cattle ranches and farmland known for timothy hay, alfalfa, vegetables and fruit. It is named for Fielden Mortimer Thorp…
- Exit 93 — Two Roads, One River
Sal: Between exits ninety-three and one hundred one. Sal: Through here the interstate and State Route Ten both follow the Yakima River. Peggy: Two roads, one river, and the river was here first. Sal: Route Ten is the old U.S. Ten, on the river's north side. It runs a little over sixteen miles from…
- Exit 85 — Rebuilt in Brick
Sal: Between exits eighty-five and ninety-three. Sal: Cle Elum was first the home of the Kittitas band of the Yakama, who fished the Yakima for salmon, steelhead and trout. The trails up at Salmon la Sac were made by the Kittitas people, as layovers on the way into the high Cascades. A treaty in…
- Exit 84 — Did They Get Off
Sal: Between exits eighty-four and eighty-five. Sal: South Cle Elum exists because of a railroad. In 1909 the Chicago, Milwaukee and Puget Sound Railway chose Cle Elum as a division point, and when its main line ended up running a mile from the city, a new town was platted beside the tracks, with…
- Exit 80 — Swift Water, Slag Piles
Sal: Between exits eighty and eighty-four. Sal: This is the exit for Roslyn and Salmon la Sac. The river to know here is the Cle Elum. Sal: A Northern Pacific station on the future site of the city was named Clealum, after the Kittitas name Tie-el-Lum, which means swift water and refers to the…
- Exit 78 — Forty-Eight On
Sal: Between exits seventy-eight and eighty. Sal: Through here the freeway passes several ranches and resort communities, Suncadia among them, between Easton and Cle Elum. Sal: Golf Course Road is home to Station 73 of Kittitas County Fire District 7. The district has existed since 1980 and covers…
- Exit 74 — The River, Whole
Sal: Between exits seventy-four and seventy-eight. Sal: East of Easton the freeway is out of the national forest, and the Yakima River runs beside it most of the way to the Kittitas Valley. Sal: The Yakima runs 214 miles from its headwaters to the Columbia, which makes it the longest river…
- Exit 71 — Dam, Lake, Turf
Sal: Between exits seventy-one and seventy-four. Sal: Between Easton's two exits is Lake Easton, a reservoir where the Yakima and Kachess rivers meet. It is held by the Easton Diversion Dam, built in 1928 and 1929, 66 feet high and 248 feet long along the crest. The lake behind it holds 3,992 acre…
- Exit 70 — Named for a Tunnel
Sal: Between exits seventy and seventy-one. Sal: This is Easton. It was platted in 1902, and the Northern Pacific Railway gave it the name, because it sits near the east end of the Stampede Tunnel through the Cascade Range. In 2020, 407 people lived there. Sal: Every year Easton is the start and…
- Exit 63 — Only the Schoolhouse, Painted
Sal: Between exits sixty-three and seventy. Sal: Cabin Creek Road is the exit for a sawmill camp, a ski club, and a construction zone. Sal: The construction first. This is the third phase of the work to rebuild the freeway east of Snoqualmie Pass. The last eight miles of that project, from the…
- Exit 62 — More Fish, Supposedly
Sal: Between exits sixty-two and sixty-three. Sal: This exit is for Stampede Pass and Kachess Lake. The Northern Pacific built its railroad over Stampede Pass, and the old toll wagon road over Snoqualmie could not compete with it. The toll road was abandoned in 1893. Sal: Kachess Lake is the…
- Exit 54 — Few Fish, Many Fixes
Sal: Between exits fifty-four and sixty-two. Sal: This is Hyak, where the Milwaukee Road's tunnel comes out of the mountain. In the fall of 1937 the railroad's executives built a ski area here, near the tunnel's portal: a large two-story day lodge and one surface lift. It started as the Snoqualmie…
- Exit 53 — City Park, Too Far
Sal: Between exits fifty-three and fifty-four. Sal: Skiing up here began as a city park. In 1933 the city of Seattle opened Municipal Park on the ground that is now Summit West. It ran the place until 1937, when the townspeople decided Snoqualmie Pass was too far away to be run as a city park…
- Exit 52 — Four Resorts, One Summit
Sal: Between exits fifty-two and fifty-three. Sal: This is Snoqualmie Pass, and the ski slopes here are the Summit at Snoqualmie: four base areas that used to be individually owned and operated resorts. Summit West was once named Snoqualmie Summit, Summit Central was Ski Acres, and Summit East was…
- Exit 47 — Wagon Ruts, Waterfalls
Sal: Between exits forty-seven and fifty-two. Sal: This is the steep grade just below Snoqualmie Pass. Near the Asahel Curtis Picnic Area, the two directions of the freeway split around a wide median that holds the Denny Creek Campground, and the road runs on two high viaducts. Sal: Between them…
- Exit 45 — Talapus, Mostly Mud
Sal: Between exits forty-five and forty-seven. Sal: Near here, a forest road runs under the freeway to the Talapus Lake trailhead. The trail climbs at a moderate grade through dark, cool forest, past tall cedars and hemlocks, with Talapus Creek running downhill beside it. Peggy: Cedars, hemlocks…
- Exit 42 — Rough Field Landing
Sal: Between exits forty-two and forty-five. Sal: Beside the freeway in the upper valley is a strip of turf called Bandera State Airport: one runway, 2,344 feet long, at an elevation of 1,636 feet. The state's aviation division owns it. It was built in 1948 as one of the first state airports, and…
- Exit 38 — Too Much Dynamite
Sal: Between exits thirty-eight and forty-two. Sal: Above the river on this stretch runs the old grade of the Milwaukee Road. Between the Change Creek and Hull Creek viaducts, a construction contractor named McLean used too much dynamite and blew out the roadbed he was supposed to be building…
- Exit 34 — Edgewick, Washed Out
Sal: Between exits thirty-four and thirty-eight. Sal: Past North Bend the freeway follows the South Fork of the Snoqualmie. Sal: There used to be a town along here called Edgewick. Its name was stitched together from two settlers, Vinnedge and Weeks. It was the North Bend Lumber Company's town…
- Exit 32 — Where I-90 Began
Sal: Between exits thirty-two and thirty-four. Sal: This is where the interstate started on this side of the mountains. In 1957 North Bend held a ribbon cutting for the first piece of the new Interstate 90 west of Snoqualmie Pass. It ran 3.7 miles, from North Bend to Tanner, with four lanes where…
- Exit 31 — Pie, Coffee, Neon
Sal: Between exits thirty-one and thirty-two. Sal: North Bend is the town David Lynch put on the map with Twin Peaks, which was partly filmed here. Twede's Cafe, which played the Double R Diner in the show, calls itself a place both wonderful and strange, and by its own account a visit hardly…
- Exit 27 — A Church on Rails
Sal: Between exits twenty-seven and thirty-one. Sal: Snoqualmie keeps a church that was built to ride the rails. The Messenger of Peace is a chapel car, seventy feet long, put together in 1898 for the American Baptist Home Mission Society. Women of the church raised the money for it, and it got…
- Exit 25 — The Diamond Crossover
Sal: Between exits twenty-five and twenty-seven. Sal: Where SR 18 meets I-90 is a diverging diamond. Traffic on SR 18 crosses to the opposite side of the road to pass beneath the freeway bridges, then crosses back. Nobody has to turn across oncoming cars, so the signals need fewer phases. The…
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