Ladder Creek Falls and Gardens

Seattle's public power utility had to sell its Skagit dams to the voters who paid for them, and its superintendent, J.D. Ross, was a showman. Behind the Gorge Powerhouse at Newhalem, Ladder Creek drops down a stair of rock into polished pools, and from the 1920s Ross turned the slope into a garden: paths, rock pools and fountains, exotic plants and, by the mid-1930s, thousands of colored lights strung through the trees and aimed at the falls.

The generators at Gorge were formally started by President Calvin Coolidge on September 17, 1924. From 1928 City Light ran Skagit Tours. Visitors rode the company's steam train twenty-three miles up the canyon from Rockport, ate chicken dinners at the Gorge Inn, walked through the gardens to the lit falls at dusk, and went on by incline railway and boat up to Diablo Dam. By 1942 more than a hundred thousand people had made the trip and seen the city's idea of an electric future. The war ended the overnight tours, and the garden went to seed.

Ross died in 1939 and is buried in a crypt at the foot of Ross Mountain in Newhalem. City Light gardeners have since brought the garden back, the old wiring is still visible in the trees, and the falls are lit again each night with LED lights.