Martin Ski Dome
Managed by the Lake Easton State Park, it provides access to the snow sports trails around and through Martin.
The flat easy trails are built and maintained in partnership by the Sons of Norway and the Ski for Light charity.
[6] A few more minutes up the dual groomed (x-country on the South, snowmobile on the North) Stampede Pass road is the Cascade Sons of Norway lodge Trollhaugen.
Just over a half mile North of the Sno-Park, the Stampede Pass road crosses the Palouse to Cascades State Park Trail.
Prior to the Stampede Tunnel, to reach the Puget Sound region from east of the Cascades, Northern Pacific Railroad (NP) trains had to pay for trackage rights on the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company (OR&N) tracks from Wallulla, Washington along the Columbia River to Portland.
After that a car ferry across the Columbia returned trains to NP tracks north to Tacoma (1873) and eventually Seattle (1884).
[8] NP engineers spent from 1873 to 1884 narrowing down the candidate passes for crossing the Cascades to three: Snoqualmie, Stampede, and Natchess (Naches).
At risk of losing millions of acres of land grants for failure to build a direct line to the Puget Sound, NP put out bids to drill the Stampede Tunnel in just 28 months.
It took months to arrive as an army of men felled trees and built plank roads over which to haul the machines and supplies.
[9][11] Once the caravan arrived, they set up their sawmill and used the lumber to build bunkhouses, stables, a machine shop, warehouses, a hospital, a restaurant, a saloon, a steam plant, and the station house.
[8] In April 1886, under pressure from increasing OR&N through rates, NP decided to also build a temporary switchback over Stampede Pass.
In January 1888, a pair of Leslie rotary steam snow shovels arrived to keep the switchback line cleared.
The crew of 124 men (100 more than usual) tasked with keeping the line open with two rotaries and a plow could not remember a worse time.
[12] On August 13, 1983, Burlington Northern discontinued use of the 78-mile line through the Stampede Tunnel, from Auburn to Cle Elum, but did not abandon the right of way.
[definition needed][23] Starting in the early 1920s, skiers from Cle Elum, Puget Sound and Seattle's King Street Station would ride the Northern Pacific Railroad to the Martin, Washington stop.
The railroad supplied "cozy warm shelter" in a dozen specially equipped bunk-cars and meal cars on a side track at the Martin station.
In 1928, The Mountaineers built the Meany Ski Hut on 54 acres of Tunnel City, a 5-minute walk from the Martin rail stop.
In 1939 the railroad spent $8,235 to build a Lodge with accommodations for 30 overnight guests and a nearby caretaker's cabin on the eastern portal of the Stampede Tunnel.
[27] It was located just across the railroad tracks from the Meany Ski Hut and closed in 1942 with the start of World War II.
There were two large living rooms with fireplaces, bunks in the women's and men's dormitories and a kitchen where skiers could cook their own meals.
[33] They also added floodlights for night skiing, a PA system for music, and gasoline drums to power the longer and now faster rope tows that ran at 750 feet a minute.
[43] The Husky Chalet at Martin was the home base and center for HWSC's skiing until the lodge burned in the spring of 1949.
Forest Service road 54 is split groomed for tracked snow machines on the north side and non-motorized (skiers, sled dogs, etc.)
