Unsigned Turnout
Every winter, the State of Washington closes about forty miles of State Route 20, the North Cascades Highway, between the gate at Diablo and the gate past Mazama on the east side. The road goes up over Rainy Pass and Washington Pass, a little under 5,500 feet, and the avalanche chutes above it dump snow and rock and whole trees across the pavement all winter long. Nobody tries to keep it open. In the spring, usually starting in March, crews from both sides start plowing toward each other, and sometime in April or May they meet near the top, and the road opens again, and the tourists come.
I’ve been on the west-side crew for eleven springs. I run a rotary plow, a big orange machine with an auger on the front that eats snow and throws it off the side of the road in an arc. My father ran one before me. He’s the one who told me the rule, my first season, sitting in the cab of his pickup at the Diablo shop at five in the morning with a thermos between us.
“Some nights up there you’re going to see a sign,” he said. “Viewpoint. Scenic turnout. Pull off, it’ll say, with an arrow. Every real sign on this highway is brown with white letters, made by the state, on a steel post. If you see one that isn’t brown, you don’t read it. You don’t slow down. You sure as hell don’t pull in. You keep your eyes on the yellow line and you keep going till you get to a real mile marker.”
I said, “What happens if you pull in?”
He poured coffee into the thermos cap and drank it and didn’t answer. After a while he said, “You’ll know the sign when you see it. It’ll be the most beautiful view you ever saw.”
You have to understand how strange the road is in the spring. Nobody’s there. Forty miles of mountain highway with no traffic at all, cut between walls of snow higher than a house. At night, with the plow lights on, it’s like driving down a white hallway with no ceiling. Stars above. The engine. The auger roaring. Snow arcing off into the dark.
We work in shifts around the clock when the weather’s right. A night shift on the rotary is ten hours alone in the cab. I’d see the night-shift loader operator a couple of times, and the avalanche crew’s truck sometimes, and that was it. Most of the night it’s just you and the cut.
My first three springs I didn’t see anything. My fourth, I saw the sign.
It was April, around two in the morning, just below Rainy Pass. I came around a bend and my lights hit a sign on the right, where there shouldn’t have been anything but a wall of snow.
It was white. Not brown. White, with black letters, hand-painted, on a wooden post. It was clean, like it had just been put up, with no snow on it at all, though the snowbank on either side of it was twenty feet tall.
I didn’t read it. I’d been ready for it for four years and I didn’t read it. I put my eyes on the place where the yellow line would be under the snow, and I kept the auger going and kept my speed, and I went by it.
But you can’t not see. That’s the thing nobody tells you. You can refuse to read something, but your eyes take it anyway, and later it comes back to you. I knew it had an arrow pointing right. I knew there were four words. I knew the last word was VIEW.
And past the sign, on the right, there was a gap in the snowbank. A clean opening, plowed out wide and square, the way we’d cut a turnout. Like somebody had already been there with a machine.
And through the gap, I could see lights.
Not stars. Lights below me. A valley, very far down, full of lights, like a city seen from an airplane. Gold and white and soft red. They went on and on.
There’s no valley there. On the right side of the road below Rainy Pass is the mountain, going up.
I didn’t stop. I kept my eyes on the line. In about a quarter mile the sign was behind me, and the gap, and I got to milepost 157, a real one, brown and white on a steel post, and I pulled over and sat there until my shift was over and I could see daylight coming up over the peaks.
When I drove back down in the morning, the snowbank on the right was solid. No sign. No gap.
I asked my father about it that weekend. He was retired by then, living in Marblemount. I told him what I’d seen and he listened and nodded like I was telling him about the weather.
“You did good,” he said.
“What were the lights?”
He was quiet a long time. Then he said, “You know they find cars up there sometimes. In the spring.”
I did know. Everybody on the crew knows. Every few years, when we dig out a stretch of the closed highway, the rotary hits something under the snow, and it’s a car. Not crashed. Parked. Neatly pulled off on the shoulder, sometimes with the keys in the ignition and the gas tank empty, as if it had sat there idling until it ran out. No one inside. No tracks, of course, because whatever happened, happened under thirty feet of snow, sometime in the winter, when the highway was closed and gated at both ends and nobody could have driven in.
There was a minivan from Idaho in 2014. A pickup in 2019 that turned out to belong to a man reported missing from Wenatchee. A small blue hatchback, the year before I started, with a car seat in the back. That one my father dug out himself.
“They’re all parked on the right,” my father said. “Facing a snowbank. Every one of them. Like they pulled off to look at something.”
I said, “But how did they get in? The road’s closed.”
My father said, “The road’s closed to us.”
I’ve thought about that a lot. What it meant.
I think the highway has two sides, and in winter, when the gates are shut and nobody’s on it, it isn’t empty. It’s busy. There’s another road up there in the dark, running alongside ours, through the snow, and it’s full. Traffic on it, going up toward the pass, toward a turnout with a view, in the deep middle of winter, with the snow coming down. And every so often someone from our side gets onto it. Somebody driving late, maybe, coming over Stevens Pass or down from Canada, on a road they think is a different one. They see a sign. Viewpoint. They’re tired, they want to stretch their legs. They pull in.
And whatever they see from that turnout, they stay. And the car sits there idling, on our side of the road, till it runs out of gas, and then the snow covers it, and in the spring, the rotary finds it.
I think the lights in the valley are them. I think it’s the turnout, from the other side. I think if you pull in you go down there and you don’t come back.
That’s what I think. I don’t know.
This spring, I saw the sign again.
It was May. We were almost through. The east-side crew was a couple of miles away and we’d been talking on the radio about meeting at Washington Pass in the morning. Two in the morning, below the pass. I came around the bend.
The sign was brown.
That’s what I want you to understand. It was brown, with white letters, on a steel post, exactly like a state sign. Exactly. Same font. Same reflective coating, catching my lights. And my eyes did what eyes do. They read it, because it was brown, and brown meant safe, and I’d been reading brown signs on that road for eleven years.
SCENIC VIEWPOINT. PULL OFF HERE.
My hands turned the wheel. I didn’t decide to. They just turned, the way they would for any real turnout, and the rotary swung right, toward the gap in the snowbank, and through the windshield I saw the valley.
I can’t describe it. I’ve tried with my wife and I can’t. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Lights going down and down in long gold strings, switchbacks, a road winding down into a valley so deep the bottom of it was a kind of glow. And on the road, headlights. Hundreds of headlights. All going down, slowly, in a long, patient line.
The rotary’s front wheels went into the gap.
What stopped me was the radio. The east-side crew lead, a woman named Joanne Pirtle who I’d been on the radio with every night for a month, came on and said, “West side, you there? I got your lights. I can see you, you’re almost to us. Where are you going? You’re turning off the road.”
Her voice was so ordinary. So tired. And I thought, she can see me. Somebody on our side can see me.
I stood on the brake.
The rotary stopped with its front end in the gap. The auger was still going. It was throwing snow out into the valley, and the snow went out in its long arc, and it didn’t come down. It just went out over the lights and kept going and went dark.
I put it in reverse. I backed out onto the highway. It took about a minute. It felt like a year.
When I was all the way back on the road, with my lights pointed up the highway, I looked to the right, and there was just snowbank. And the sign was gone.
Joanne’s crew met us at the pass at dawn. She asked what I’d been doing. I said I thought I’d seen a rock in the road. She looked at me for a while and didn’t push it.
They changed the sign. That’s what I’m trying to say. It used to be white. Whatever puts it there learned that we’d stopped reading the white ones. So it made a brown one.
My father’s in the care home in Sedro-Woolley now. I told him about it, and he didn’t say anything for a long time, and then he held my hand, which he never does, and said, “It’s never had to try that hard before. It’s getting hungry.”
So here’s the new rule, and if you drive SR 20 you should know it, because they’re talking about keeping the highway open longer every year, earlier in the spring and later in the fall:
If you’re on the North Cascades Highway at night, and you see a sign for a viewpoint, any sign, any color, don’t read it. Don’t pull in. The real viewpoints on that road are all marked on the state map, and they’re all in daylight places, Diablo Lake, Washington Pass, with railings and restrooms and parking lot lines. You know where they are before you get there. If you don’t know about it beforehand, it isn’t real.
And if you’re up there between the gates, in the closed season, for any reason at all, and you see headlights coming toward you down the mountain, don’t flash your lights at them. Don’t wave.
They’re not coming down. They’re going down. And they’d like the company.