East Glacier Loop Hike Self-Guided Audio Tour

About this tour

Most people walk the East Glacier Loop assuming the trail was built for them. It wasn't. It was hacked out of a coastal rainforest in the early nineteen hundreds by men who had nothing against scenery and no time for it — they were trying to outsmart a mountain. The Treadwell Mining Company, running one of the largest gold mines on the planet from across the channel on Douglas Island, had a problem. Their stamp mills ate electricity twenty-four hours a day, coal was ruinously expensive to ship, and falling water was free if you could harness it. So they sent surveyors with brass transits into temperate rainforest, drilled a 650-foot tunnel through granite by hand, threw together a "temporary" wooden dam above the glacier, ran a pipeline a mile down the valley, strung a transmission line through this exact stretch of woods, and finally laid a submarine cable across the saltwater channel — all to turn the lights on at a gold mill fifteen miles away. The trail beneath your boots is what's left of that gamble. This GPS-triggered audio tour walks you through the full story — the surveyors who drew the impossible line, the cable tramway, the hand-cut tunnel, the pile of logs that outlasted the mine it powered, the 1917 cave-in that ended the whole enterprise in a matter of hours. Plus John Muir's 1879 canoe view of the unnamed Auk Glacier, the Áak'w Ḵwáan watershed the miners walked into, the climax forest the mine could not afford to log, and the wandering boulders the ice left behind.

Stops on this tour

1. 1The Treadwell Battery
2. 2The Transmission Line
3. 3Drawing the Line
4. 4The AJ Waterfall
5. 5The Living Staircase
6. 6The Gorge & The Dam
7. 7The Glacial Erratics
8. 8The Great Reclamation
9. 9The 1917 Cave-in
10. 10The Hoist House
11. 11The 650-Foot Tunnel
12. 12The Iron Highway
13. 13The Ancient Forest
14. 14Muir's Vista
15. 15The Trail of Pioneers
16. 16The Rainforest Sponge

Route map