Ginny meets a desperate heiress on a train and on impulse they switch identities but as an avalanche engulfs the train, the limits of human endurance and loyalty are tested.

On a long train ride to Seattle, Ginny swaps identities with a woman who doesn't want to marry a man she has never seen, but their innocent ploy is threatened when an avalanche engulfs the train.

The Wellington snow slide of 1910 was—and still is—the deadliest avalanche in America’s history. Lauren Tarshis's story of one child surviving the frozen nightmare pounds with page-turning action and heartwarming hope. The snow came down faster than train crews could clear the tracks, piling up in drifts 20 feet high. At the Wellington train depot in the Cascade Mountains, two trains sat stranded, blocked in by snow slides to the east and west. Some passengers braved the storm to hike off the mountain, but many had no choice but to wait out the storm. But the storm didn’t stop. One day passed, then two, three . . . six days. The snow turned to rain. Then, just after midnight on March 1, a lightning storm struck the mountain, sending a ten-foot-high wave of snow barreling down the mountain. The trains tumbled 150 feet. 96 people were dead. The Wellington avalanche forever changed railroad engineering. New York Times bestselling author Lauren Tarshis tells the tale of one girl who survived, emerging from the snow forever changed herself.

The never-before-told story of one of the worst rail disasters in U.S. history in which two trains full of people, trapped high in the Cascade Mountains, are hit by a devastating avalanche In February 1910, a monstrous blizzard centered on Washington State hit the Northwest, breaking records. The world stopped—but nowhere was the danger more terrifying than near a tiny town called Wellington, perched high in the Cascade Mountains, where a desperate situation evolved minute by minute: two trainloads of cold, hungry passengers and their crews found themselves marooned without escape, their railcars gradually being buried in the rising drifts. For days, an army of the Great Northern Railroad's most dedicated men—led by the line's legendarily courageous superintendent, James O'Neill—worked round-the-clock to rescue the trains. But the storm was unrelenting, and to the passenger's great anxiety, the railcars—their only shelter—were parked precariously on the edge of a steep ravine. As the days passed, food and coal supplies dwindled. Panic and rage set in as snow accumulated deeper and deeper on the cliffs overhanging the trains. Finally, just when escape seemed possible, the unthinkable occurred: the earth shifted and a colossal avalanche tumbled from the high pinnacles, sweeping the trains and their sleeping passengers over the steep slope and down the mountainside. Centered on the astonishing spectacle of our nation's deadliest avalanche, Gary Krist's The White Cascade is the masterfully told story of a supremely dramatic and never-before-documented American tragedy. An adventure saga filled with colorful and engaging history, this is epic narrative storytelling at its finest.

The town of Wellington was located by the Stevens Pass summit in the Cascade Mountains. During the last days of February in 1910, the snow was relentless in the Cascades, falling as much as one foot per hour and rising up to 20 feet deep in areas. Rotary plows could not keep the lines open as snow covered the railroad tracks almost immediately after being cleared. The Seattle Express, coming from Spokane, and a fast mail train were stranded just beyond the "safety" of the Cascade Tunnel, where they remained unmovable for almost a week under the snowpacked mountains. On March 1, an avalanche swept away the tracks and passengers aboard the two trains as well as several of Wellington's buildings and homes. Almost 100 individuals were killed in just a few seconds, creating America's deadliest avalanche and train disaster in history. Today, the site is part of the Iron Goat Trail off Highway 2, east of Skykomish. The snowshed, the abandoned original Cascade Tunnel, and various scraps of the trains left in the ravine are the only evidence that remain of Wellington, its long-forgotten inhabitants, or the disaster.

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press The history of the opening of Stevens Pass through the northern Cascades into the Seattle region is a saga of nearly superhuman feats by railroad construction crews, ghastly design mistakes, natural catastrophes, and the determination of railroad owners to connect isolated communities.

True accounts of major disasters in Washington history are retold in this engagingly written collection. From The Seattle fire of 1889, the 1910 train avalanche on Stevens Pass, and the 1915 Ravensdale Coal Mine explosion, the 1955 airliner crash in residential Riverton, to the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption, Washington has been home to some of the nation's most dramatic moments. Each story reveals not only the circumstances surrounding the disaster and the magnitude of the devastation but also the courage and ingenuity displayed by those who survived and the heroism of those who helped others, often risking their own lives in rescue efforts.