Iron Horse State Park, part of the Washington State Park System, is a 1,612-acre (7 km2) state park located in the Cascade Mountains and Yakima River Valley, between Cedar Falls on the west and the Columbia River on the east.
The park is a rail trail that crosses Snoqualmie Pass. The heritage park commemorating railroading was once in the right-of-way of The Milwaukee Road, officially the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad. The right-of-way was acquired by the state, through a quitclaim deed, as a result of the railroad's 1977 bankruptcy, leading to the railroad's decision to embargo all traffic to the west coast in 1980. The state acquired the land in the early 1980s and eventually converted into a 110 miles (177 km) of hiking, mountain biking, and horseback riding trail. It is the developed portion of the John Wayne Pioneer Trail, which continues to the Idaho border.
The trail west continues as the Snoqualmie Valley Trail of the King County Regional Trail System. The trail east along the old Milwaukee Road is also called John Wayne Pioneer Trail, though Europeans arrived by boat or by travelling north from The Oregon Trail (1840), or the railhead near south Puget Sound (1853 or c. 1872, respectively). Arrival to the Snoqualmie Cascades of the Great Northern Railway in 1910 and the Chicago, Milwaukee and Puget Sound Railway in 1911 provided one of the means for development of the logging railroads and timber industry that eventually cut nearly all the Cascade Mountains forests. The park is part of the Mountains to Sound Greenway preserving the scenic corridor.
Read more about Iron Horse State Park: Recreation
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