Qualla: Naches Trail

Naches Trail: Introduction

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Light, CC BY-SA 4.0. One at a time, the wagons went over the edge. Men wrapped ropes around tree trunks and paid out line, bracing against the pull of gravity as each wagon inched down a near-vertical drop of several hundred yards. Women and children took a longer path, picking their way down a narrow footpath the Yakama had worn into the mountainside over generations. It was October 1853, and more than thirty families were attempting something no wagon train had done before: cross the Cascade Range at Naches Pass to reach the promised farmland of Puget Sound. The trail they followed, stretching from the Naches River in the dry country east of the mountains to the Greenwater River on the forested western side, had been a trade route for the Yakama and Interior Salish people long before any American settler set foot on it.

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Image: Chris Light | CC BY-SA 4.0

Naches Trail: A Path Older Than Its Name

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Light, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Yakama people and Interior Salish people traveled this corridor through the Cascades for centuries, connecting the grasslands of the upper Yakima Valley to the damp lowlands of what is now Pierce County. The first written account of the route came in 1841, when Lieutenant Rob...

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Image: Chris Light | CC BY-SA 4.0

Naches Trail: Thirty Wagons Over the Edge

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Light, CC BY-SA 4.0. James Longmire led his family out of Indiana on March 6, 1853, bound for the Pacific Northwest. By late September, his party of more than thirty wagons had reached the upper Yakima Valley, where the Yakama under Chief Owhi offered hospitality in the Wenas Valley. The emigrants fo...

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Image: Chris Light | CC BY-SA 4.0

Naches Trail: The Road That Never Was

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ron Clausen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Despite the Longmire crossing, Naches Pass never became a proper road. The dense old-growth forest blanketing the western slopes made construction prohibitively expensive, and when the territorial legislature evaluated the route in 1853, engineers judged it infeasible. Snoqualmie...

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Image: Ron Clausen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Naches Trail: What Longmire Left Behind

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided, Public domain. James Longmire settled on Yelm Prairie after the crossing, but the mountain that had nearly stopped his wagons kept pulling him back. In 1883, at the age of sixty-three, he reached the summit of Mount Rainier. That same year he discovered the mineral hot springs on the mountain's...

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Image: Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided | Public domain