Hiking Safety for the Snoqualmie High Country

What we see here are the cover and back-panel of a folded brochure — the safety text itself is inside, out of view. The topographic backdrop on both sides is drawn from USGS quadrangle maps of the terrain around Snoqualmie Pass and the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, roughly 50 miles east of Seattle. Identifiable features across both panels include Snow Lake, Crystal Mountain, the Middle Fork Miller River valley, Goldmyer Hot Springs, Dutch Miller Gap, Denny Creek, and the community of Hyak — a tight slice of the central Washington Cascades.

The "Denver 25" address for the U.S. Geological Survey pins the printing to the era before ZIP codes. Large American cities were assigned numbered postal zones starting in 1943; Denver's zone 25 corresponds precisely to today's ZIP code 80225, still the address of the Denver Federal Center where USGS distributed its topo map catalog. Because ZIP codes were phased in starting July 1963 and most federal agencies updated their printed addresses within a year or two, this brochure almost certainly predates 1965 — squarely inside what historians of Northwest recreation call the first major hiking surge, a run of Puget Sound–area trail use that accelerated through the late 1950s and exploded in the mid-1960s. REI tripled its catalog size during the 1950s; The Mountaineers began issuing formal mountaineering courses widely copied by clubs nationwide; and the North Cascades Conservation Council, founded 1957, was putting the Alpine Lakes region on the political map.

A few of the labeled features on page 2 reward a second look. Goldmyer Hot Springs — shown on the topo as "GOLDMYER HOT SPS" — was hit by catastrophic January 1960 flooding that destroyed the resort bathhouses, footbridges, and a small hydroelectric system built by the Morrow family; the springs weren't formally managed again until a nonprofit took over in 1976. Hyak, labeled near the lower right of page 2, takes its name from a Chinook Jargon word meaning "hurry" or "swift"; the community began as a Milwaukee Road railroad station established around 1915 at the eastern portal of the Snoqualmie Pass tunnel. Dutch Miller Gap, marked mid-panel, is noted by the Forest Service as the only major east-west pass in the Washington Cascades that has never had a highway running through it. A credit line at the lower right — "Richard Fargher" — has left no traceable publication record, suggesting a small-run club or self-published production rather than a commercial imprint.