Snoqualmie Falls

Thirty miles east of Seattle, the Snoqualmie River pours 268 feet over a rock ledge — roughly a hundred feet farther than Niagara’s plunge — throwing up a curtain of mist you can feel from the observation deck. Snoqualmie Falls is one of Washington’s most visited attractions, drawing well over 1.5 million people a year. It is also two remarkable things at once: the place of creation in Snoqualmie tribal tradition, and the site of a pioneering power plant hidden in the rock beneath the water.

A Sacred Place

For the Snoqualmie people, the falls are the center of the world. In tribal tradition recorded by HistoryLink, Snoqualm — Moon the Transformer — shaped the world and created the falls, and Snoqualmie tribal members describe the rising mist as carrying prayers upward to their ancestors and the Creator. Tribal leaders have called the falls “central to the tribe’s history, culture, spiritual practice and identity”; one council member put it simply: “the Falls is like a church.”

That significance carries official recognition. On June 22, 1992, Snoqualmie Falls was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a traditional cultural property associated with the Snoqualmie people — the nomination documents the falls’ role in Snoqualmie creation tradition and spiritual practice, along with its 268-foot height.

Harnessing the Falls

In the 1890s, a civil engineer named Charles H. Baker saw the falls as an answer to the young region’s hunger for electricity. With financing from his father, Chicago businessman William T. Baker, he organized the Snoqualmie Falls Power Company, bought land at the falls, and in April 1898 began blasting a powerhouse cavity into the bedrock. On July 31, 1899, Baker’s 18-month-old daughter Dorothy pulled the switch, and generators spinning 270 feet below the surface began sending power to Seattle and Tacoma.

Puget Sound Energy — whose corporate forerunner, Seattle-Tacoma Power Company, bought the Snoqualmie Falls Power Company in 1908 — describes Plant 1 as the world’s first completely underground power plant, and the American Society of Civil Engineers, which named the cavity generating station a historic civil engineering landmark, credits it as the first successful underground hydroelectric station. A second powerhouse, Plant 2, was built a quarter-mile downstream in 1910 and expanded in 1957. Together the plants generate about 54 megawatts today, operating under a 40-year federal license issued in 2004; much of the drama visitors see at the brink varies with season and with how much water is routed through the plants.

The Tribe and the Falls

The power project and the sacred site have coexisted uneasily from the beginning. Diverting river water through turbines means less water over the falls, and the Snoqualmie Tribe has long pressed federal regulators to protect the falls’ natural flow and character — advocacy that helped win the 1992 National Register listing and shaped conditions of the plant’s relicensing. More recently, the tribe’s Ancestral Lands Movement has campaigned to protect the falls from disruptions such as unregulated helicopter tours, gathering tens of thousands of petition signatures and support from neighboring cities.

Reclaiming Ground at the Falls

In late 2019, the Snoqualmie Tribe purchased the Salish Lodge & Spa — the hotel perched at the lip of the falls, opened in 1919 as the Snoqualmie Falls Lodge — along with 45 acres of surrounding land, buying the property from the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe for $125 million. The purchase halted a previously approved development of nearly 200 residences and a 200-room hotel next to the falls, and returned the land around the tribe’s most sacred site to Snoqualmie ownership. The hydroelectric plants remain owned and operated by Puget Sound Energy under their federal license.

Visiting

Today a free park with viewing platforms overlooks the falls, and a trail descends to the river below. Interpretive displays tell both of the site’s stories — the tribe’s, reaching back to the beginning of the world, and the engineers’, reaching back to 1899. Come after autumn rains or spring snowmelt, when the river runs high and the falls thunder at full width, and it is easy to understand why this place has drawn people for as long as anyone can remember.