A Short Tunnel and Its Story
The Origins of Pedestrian Tunnel Reveals An Earlier Purpose
I had not lived in Bellingham, WA, for a week when I first walked through this tunnel. Residing as I was at the top of Liberty Street with the forested mountain of Sehome Hill Arboretum in my backyard, it was only a matter of days after settling in before I hit the trail. A mild and green month of June was all around me as I hiked up one of the hill’s ridge paths, and, in the breadth of a moment, I ended up at this alluring hole in the hill.
The tunnel had an old, small white sign painted with red letters bolted into the rock above the southeastern entrance. But as rusty and unreadable as this lonely clue was, it offered no indication as to why the tunnel was there. In that summer of 1988, there was not yet a history plaque nearby as there is today to enlighten the curious, and while I sensed the mature trees looming all around were in on the secret, they wouldn’t spill the beans. So, for a time, the tunnel was left enshrouded in mystery.
Since there is more enthusiasm for history in my blood than there is iron, this single piece of a greater puzzle tugged at me. Like an exclamation point missing its exclamation, I sensed it was a remnant — but of what? A tunnel is no small endeavor. It requires a lot of resources, time, and hard work to burrow through rock. I entertained whether or not this short little tunnel — which appeared to be quite old — could truly have been made simply for the enjoyment of arboretum hikers of yesteryear. I had my doubts. Both a railroad and mining were quickly ruled out, so I took this matter to the public library, where I did not have to read too far to learn that the tunnel was indeed a remnant, but not of any industry. The biggest clue had been at the top of the hill all along, in the old asphalt at my feet. It had been created as a civic asset for early recreational motorists.
According to an article in the August 2018 edition of Whatcom Watch, the city purchased Sehome Hill for park purposes in 1920. One-way paths for motorists were planned all around the top of the hill, and excavations began in earnest a few years later. During the development of these roads and several viewpoints on Sehome Hill in 1923, the tunnel was bored out of the sandstone ridge with picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows. Interestingly, the engineers smartly directed this feat to be achieved without dynamite as it could have weakened or collapsed the remaining rock above.
Included in the Whatcom Watch article are black and white photographs of motorists parked at the inspiring, unobstructed viewpoints and driving through the tunnel, circa 1925.
As the next forty years of the 20th century played out, some of the older, narrow roads on the hill — perhaps for safety and traffic flow reasons — were closed to cars and used as additional park paths. While the rest of the one-way loops weaving themselves around the crest of the hill remained open to motorists for many more years, it is unclear if cars were barred from the narrow tunnel during one of those earlier waves of closures or if the tunnel continued to swallow Detroit’s best for another decade or so. Designed at the outset for tiny, slaphappy Model Ts but just barely wide enough to handle an anxious acre of Cadillac, it could very well have been phased into pedestrian-only status at an earlier point. I tried to get a better grip on this date, but the answer seemed too slippery to pin down when I asked several older, life-long residents of Bellingham. None of them could recall exactly just how long the tunnel had remained drivable.
Whatever the case, in 1975, fifty-some years after the motorist’s park was created, driving on the hill came to an end when all the old roads, parking area viewpoints, and certainly this quiet little tunnel, were closed to vehicles. After a few transitional years, the roads were opened back up for pedestrians only in 1977.
For the next four decades, it was a lovely walk through the short tunnel.
But nothing is static. In the late spring of 2020, I was disappointed to find that this iconic local feature that I have long taken for granted was suddenly closed to the public for what I thought would be an eternity. Rocks had been crumbling off from above, endangering the public, and a few of those naughty, jagged culprits appear to be lying on the ground in the first photo above. Understandably, this little red-flag event swiftly set in motion the spring-loaded clockwork of bureaucratic risk management. In the blink of a civil servant's eye, the powers that manage the hill — the City of Bellingham and WWU — quickly replaced all the fluttering caution tape and temporary sawhorse-barricades with colossal, castle-evoking barrier gates, skillfully fitted into both entrances. Stoutly constructed of wood and steel mesh and locked by those few who hold the key, these two “cage-gates,” missing only a drawbridge and moat, seemed to be impregnated with the unquestionable statement of forever.
Aside from the hard-hat builders appointed to construct the barrier gates, I can’t help but wonder when and who the last vulnerable pedestrian to walk blissfully through the tunnel was before it closed. Maybe they never even knew. Then again, maybe they ended up in the emergency room with a bleeding dent in their skull or a memorable concussion.
After the tunnel was locked, visitors wielding permanent markers scrawled, in four words or less, their dismay upon the wooden cage the tunnel now found itself trapped in. It was easy to see that I was not alone in my tempered lament, and I could imagine years of disappointed park users to come.
This despondency, however, would only last a few years. I am happy to say that when I took my daughter up to the arboretum for a walk in the fall of 2023, we discovered that the gates were gone — the steep hillside above the west end had been stabilized and a log-pole railing — similar to the one in the old tunnel photo — was added to the trail above. Though the surrounding framework, with its wire mesh, were still in place just in case the gates need to return, we were free to pass through. This made my day.
How strange it now seems that I assumed the tunnel would be barred from the arboretum’s trail system for good. Instead, it remains a splendid historical feature to see and stroll through at the crest of Sehome Hill Arboretum, that peaceful 180-acres of a second-growth forest where space between people is vast, the scenery is magical during the fog of fall, and where the roar of the city is pushed back just a little to hear songbirds and breezes through the trees.
