Olallie State Park History

Olallie State Park preserves the heritage of the South Fork Snoqualmie River Valley and its uses as a travel corridor across today’s Washington State. The river runs through the park, creating its biggest attractions where it cascades over the bedrock at 77-foot Weeks Falls and 230-foot Twin Falls. The two waterfalls are also the sites of the only hydroelectric developments in Washington State Parks.

Indigenous Lands

The park lies within the traditional territories of Coast Salish Indigenous people whose present-day descendants include members of the Snoqualmie Indian Tribe, Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, Tulalip Tribes and Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. For thousands of years this area has provided habitat for a diverse community of life that forms the basis of their cultures. Fishing, hunting deer and elk and gathering berries and native plants for food and medicine, Indigenous people are the original stewards of the land.

Local tribes ceded ownership of the area to the US federal government under duress in the Treaty of Point Elliot in 1855, keeping rights to harvest natural resources in their usual and accustomed places, including the Snoqualmie River watershed.

After government surveys were completed in 1893, land surrounding Twin Falls passed into private ownership with a Homestead Entry Patent in 1895 to Tom Brown. Other lands making up today’s park were purchased as Cash Entry Patents or given as federal land grants to the Northern Pacific Railway and the State of Washington.

Run of the River

The Snoqualmie River was surveyed as a potential source of hydroelectric electricity generation to supply the needs of growing populations in nearby Seattle and Tacoma. A plant was completed at Snoqualmie Falls, about 15 miles downstream from today’s Olallie State Park, in 1899. The plant there was designed to divert water from the river through a tunnel to generating turbines at the base of the falls, taking advantage of the nearly 270-foot drop of the falls. This kind of hydroelectric plant is called “run-of-the-river,” as it relies on the river’s flow and natural drop in elevation, rather than water stored in a reservoir. Puget Sound Power and Light Company (precursor to Puget Sound Energy), the operator of the Snoqualmie Falls plant, acquired the original Tom Brown homestead at Twin Falls as another possible run-of-the-river generating plant. By 1950, much larger hydroelectric projects like Grand Coulee Dam had become the predominant source of electricity in the Pacific Northwest. On October 25, 1950, the property was purchased by the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission (WSPRC) from Puget Sound Power and Light for $2,338 and named Twin Falls State Park.

Highway Through the Mountains

Snoqualmie Pass is the lowest point in the crest of Washington’s Cascade Mountains between the Columbia River border with Oregon and the state’s northern border with Canada. It has been used as a thoroughfare to travel across the mountains for thousands of years. Indigenous people on both sides of the mountains used it as a passage for journeys to harvest resources, trade and visit.

In 1855, Seattle businessmen Dexter Horton and Charles Boren began a survey of a route through Snoqualmie Pass to link the city with resources east of the mountains. They completed a rough route to Ellensburg by 1867. Much of the route was soggy and muddy and required puncheon or corduroy construction to allow passage. Puncheon consists of logs split in half, with the flat side facing up. Corduroy roads have the round side of the log facing up, resembling corduroy cloth.

New owners in 1883 made improvements to the route, but it fell into disrepair when the Northern Pacific Railroad was completed through Stampede Pass in 1887. In 1899, David Denny was contracted by King County to reestablish the Snoqualmie Pass Wagon Road with better puncheon and corduroy, bridges and blasted sections to improve the road alignment. Remnants of the route are visible on the Weeks Falls Interpretive Trail in Olallie State Park. That same year, railroad financier Sam Hill, the builder of the Peace Arch, founded the Washington State Good Roads Association to advocate for the establishment of a state highway department. Saying “good roads are more than my hobby; they are my religion,” he lobbied to build and maintain public roads to tie together the state.

In 1912 the Good Roads Association endorsed a plan to build a state highway across Snoqualmie Pass. On March 12, 1913, Washington Governor Ernest Lister approved Senate Bill 447 making an appropriation of $335,434 for the survey, construction, and maintenance of the “Sunset Highway” between North Bend and Cle Elum. Governor Lister dedicated the completed road at the summit of the pass on July 1, 1915.

In 1956 President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act authorizing and funding the Interstate Highway System. The Snoqualmie Pass highway was designated as part of Interstate 90, the longest route in the system, stretching 3,021 miles through 13 states from Seattle to Boston.

As part of the upgrade of the route to meet safety and engineering standards in the mid-1970s, the Washington State Department of Transportation relocated a portion of Interstate 90 east of Twin Falls. Over 200 acres of land between the old and new routes, including Weeks Falls on the South Fork Snoqualmie River, was suggested as a desirable state park site. Jurisdiction and control of the land was transferred to the WSPRC on June 21, 1976.

On June 20, 1977, the WSPRC combined the newly acquired land with Twin Falls State Park and renamed the area Olallie State Park. The name was recommended by the Snoqualmie Valley Historical Society to utilize the Chinook jargon word for berries, including salmon berries, huckleberries, salal berries, and blackberries, all of which are found in the park.

Small Hydro Power

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Energy Security Act, which included a provision to “provide further encouragement for the development of small hydroelectric power projects” by requiring that electric utilities buy power from anyone who could produce it. Immediately, applications for small hydro projects exploded. Applications were filed for run-of-the-river projects at Twin Falls and Weeks Falls in Olallie State Park. On April 21, 1983, the WSPRC adopted a resolution recognizing that hydropower development “will likely result in substantial environmental and aesthetic damage to the recreation resources under the Commission’s protection and management.” They stated their opposition to “issuance of permits…for hydropower facilities affecting natural and free flowing rivers and streams located on Washington State Parks’ owned land.”

Despite the Commission’s resolution, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued licenses for the Weeks Falls and Twin Falls hydropower projects in April and May of 1985. WSPRC staff negotiated compensation contracts with the developers to mitigate impacts on the park and develop park facilities. All hydroelectric development on park land at Twin Falls was required to be underground with no surface disturbance. The developers agreed to fund and construct recreation facilities including parking areas, restrooms, bridges, trails with overlooks of the falls and an interpretive trail.

The Twin Falls project was completed in 1989 and produces enough power, on average, to power over 6,000 homes. The Weeks Falls project was completed in 1990 and produces power to serve nearly 1,200 homes. The Twin Falls project license requires a minimum Instream flow of at least 75 cubic feet per second to protect aquatic life. Consequently, the plant is unable to produce power for about three months during the summer when the South Fork Snoqualmie River flow is inadequate to meet the minimum quantity to generate electricity. At other times, the diversions of river water reduce the flow of water over the falls.

Expanding Recreational Opportunities

In 1989, the Washington State Legislature authorized the Trust Land Transfer Program. The legislature funds the transfer of state trust lands with special ecological or social values that have low income potential out of state trust ownership to a public agency that can manage the property for those values. Money from the transfer provides revenue for the trust beneficiaries and is used to buy productive replacement properties that will generate future trust income.

Nearly 2,000 acres have been added to Olallie State Park through the Trust Land Transfer program, with transfers enlarging the park in 1995 and 2005. The added lands include the slopes of 4,420-foot Mount Washington. In Fall 2017, Olallie Trail was completed on these lands, adding a new recreational opportunity for mountain biking and hiking. The challenging 9.2-mile trail was built in a partnership between the WSPRC, the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance and the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust, with funding from state recreation grants.