Fruit From Washington - Historic Kittitas Valley View
[ Kittitas Valley View
Property ]
West of the Columbia River, where a marvelous bridge nearly a mile in length carries the railroad over the great river of the North, lies the splendid Kittitas Valley. In this favored region grows everything that grows anywhere outside of the tropics--and in the broad and lovely plain, through which flows the Yakima River, life is easy and pleasant. It is well named--"The Valley of Content". On its western rim hang the jagged ridges of the mighty Cascade Mountains and towards these points the railroad. Upward again, through ragged mountain scenes the "King of the Rails" ascends the east slope of the Cascades, winding around Lake Keechelus--and here, for the first time, the eastern traveler sees something of the mighty forests of the Cascades. Dark and still and full of a nameless peace stand the great trees. Trackless are these forests, except where the long, narrow aisle of the railway opens a way through: or where a rippling brook rushes down the unknown heights. Ever increasing in number and grandeur the mountains crowd about, seeming to bar the way. The railway pierces this range through Snoqualmie Tunnel, which is 12,000 feet in length. From here the route is down grade through magnificent forests and along the rims of deep canyons carved into solid rock and carpeted with mountain shrubbery or threaded by rushing mountain streams, fed by eternal snows. Magnificent beyond compare are the Cascades, on east and west, and at the western base the Cedar River glides into the level and ripples along beside the tracks--both river and railway on their way to seattle, the first to supply the city with the purest water on the continent, the other to serve the western metropolis with its incomparable facilities and magnificent trains. ( The Van-Noy Interstate Company, 1926) |
Kittitas Valley, Wash.
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