Start at Flag Pole Park in Cle Elum, at the corner of Stafford and 2nd, and the Coal Mines Trail looks like any converted rail-bed path: wide, flat, gravel, shaded by tall trees that make you forget you're still inside town limits. Walk it far enough and you'll pass slag piles stacked into odd little hills, the concrete footprint of a coal washer on Crystal Creek, and a spur at roughly the two-mile mark that once served the No. 9 and No. 10 mines. None of it reads as scenery. It reads as infrastructure, because that's what it was.
The trail runs on the original grade of a branch line the Northern Pacific Railroad built in 1886 and 1887 to move coal out of the mountains, a line later folded into the Burlington Northern network before the tracks came up and the corridor became something you walk instead of ride. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. This isn't a nature trail with a historical marker bolted on. It's a working transportation corridor from the 1880s that has spent the century since finding new reasons to justify its own existence, and it's about to find another one.
A Railroad That Named Its Own Towns
The Northern Pacific didn't build this line through empty country. In 1883, company engineers found rich coal deposits along the route the railroad was already planning toward Stampede Pass, and by 1886 the resulting settlement was platted and named Roslyn, after a city in New York tied to the railroad vice president's girlfriend. A few miles up the line, the town of Ronald took its name from Alexander Ronald, the coal company's superintendent. The spur that connected them to Cle Elum wasn't a convenience. It was the entire point: get coal out of Roslyn and Ronald and onto trains bound for the steam locomotives climbing Snoqualmie Pass, and later to power the Cle Elum substation that ran the electrified Milwaukee Road.
In other words, Cle Elum, Roslyn, and Ronald have never really functioned as three separate towns so much as three points on one supply chain. The Coal Mines Trail just happens to be the leftover physical proof of that, formally reopened as a public path in 1994 through a cooperative agreement among Kittitas County, the City of Cle Elum, and the City of Roslyn, with help from the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust in acquiring the corridor.
What's Still Standing Along the Way
The mining history isn't abstract on this trail. Interpretive signs mark the sites of vanished settlements with names like Happy Hallow and Ducktown, communities that existed purely to house miners and disappeared once the coal ran out. Past the coal washer remains and the spur to the No. 9 and No. 10 mines, the trail continues roughly another mile to the site of the No. 1 mine on the outskirts of Roslyn, where sealed mine entrances and old building foundations are still visible for anyone willing to look. The elevation gain the entire way stays under 450 feet, which is why it's as popular with cross-country skiers and horseback riders in winter as it is with hikers and cyclists the rest of the year.
A quick list for anyone actually planning the walk this fall:
- Cle Elum access: Flag Pole Park, at Stafford Street and West 2nd Street, with street parking and no permit required
- Roslyn access: behind Old City Hall near the Slag Pile off Pennsylvania Avenue, or from the Roslyn City Clerk's office at 201 S. 1st Street
- Ronald access: near the Ronald Fire District at 1st and Atlantic, where the trail meets SR-903 and Fan House Road
- Distance: a little over six miles end to end, crossing SR-903 twice through Roslyn
- Best window: early fall, once summer heat and trail traffic thin out but before snow closes it to anything but skis
Where the Walk Actually Ends
Roslyn earns its own reputation independent of the trail. It's the town where Northern Exposure was filmed, and the Roslyn Museum on West Pennsylvania Avenue, about a block off the trail, covers the mining past in more depth than any interpretive sign can. For anyone who's walked the six miles from Cle Elum, the Brick Tavern in downtown Roslyn is the obvious place to sit down before deciding whether to walk back or arrange a ride.
Head the other direction, back toward the Cle Elum trailhead, and East First Street has its own anchor: Owens Meats, which has been smoking sausages and curing meats since 1887, the same year the original rail line finished construction. The current owners still run the same recipes, and the smoked pepperoni and beef jerky are well known enough that people drive across the state for them. It's a small detail, but it means the trail's two endpoints both date to the exact same decade the coal line went in, which is not something you can say about most six-mile walks.
The Trail Suncadia Is Now Pointing Guests Toward
Suncadia's own 2026 fall programming lists the Coal Mines Trail by name as one of its featured seasonal experiences, describing it as the link connecting Cle Elum, Roslyn, and Ronald within the Mountains to Sound Greenway National Heritage Area. That's worth noticing. A resort built around 40-plus miles of its own trail network, golf courses, and a full-service spa is actively directing guests and homeowners off its own property and onto a public rail-trail built for hauling coal. The resort isn't treating the corridor as a curiosity. It's treating it as shared infrastructure worth promoting, which tracks with what the trail has always been.
The rest of the season has its own rhythm. The Roslyn Farmers Market wrapped its 2026 run on Pennsylvania Avenue on September 13, which is as good a marker as any that summer's crowd-heavy stretch is over. The RDA Roslyn Music Jam, held the first Wednesday of every month from March through November at the RDA Creative Center, keeps running past that date, meaning early October and early November still have a live-music evening on the calendar even after the market tables are packed up for the year.
A Trail the City Wants to Make Longer
Here's the part that turns this from a nice walk into something closer to a pattern. The City of Cle Elum's own 2026 Parks, Recreation and Open Space Element lays out, in plain language, an ambition to connect the Coal Mines Trail to the Palouse to Cascades Trail network, and separately to connect the Suncadia and Bullfrog Flats communities to Cle Elum with safe, non-vehicle passage. The plan even identifies Lower Peoh Point Road, which already intersects the Palouse to Cascades Pioneer/Iron Horse Trail, as a likely alignment for that connection, while acknowledging the road currently has no sidewalks and no traffic control at most intersections.
That's a city government, in writing, describing the same impulse that built the original coal spur in the 1880s: link the resort and mining-era towns together with a dedicated corridor rather than leave them dependent on cars and county roads. The Coal Mines Trail already proved the concept works. Now the same logic is being extended toward Suncadia, more than a century after Roslyn and Ronald were platted specifically so a railroad could reach them.
Walk the six miles between Flag Pole Park and the Ronald Fire District this fall, before the passes close for the season, and you're not just getting exercise with a scenic backdrop. You're tracing the same line that decided where these towns would sit in the first place, at the exact moment the city is trying to draw it a little farther.
If you're spending part of this fall in the Cle Elum corridor and want a running list of trailheads, seasonal events, and locally owned stops worth the drive, Brian Hopper keeps one updated for the area.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
