The road over Chinook Pass was celebrated with a mock wedding between Enumclaw and Yakima, in a fog so thick nobody could film it

In late August 1931 a newspaper in Kennewick ran a notice that sounds like a prank. "Who wants to be a bridesmaid and get into the movies?" it asked. "Chance of a lifetime is being presented by the Chamber of Commerce for some pretty young lady to bust into publicity." The wedding was real, sort of. The groom was a dairy town. The bride was a fruit town. The ring was a highway over the Cascades, and the ceremony was set for a lake at the top of Chinook Pass.

Seventeen years of boosting

For the plateau and the Yakima Valley, a road over the mountains had been a cause for a generation. The project began in 1913 as the McClellan Pass Highway and was renamed the Naches Pass Highway by 1925, after the old wagon route this site wrote about last week, and the name stuck even after the route moved. "A change in the highway route, which was originally planned for Naches pass, now takes the road thru Chinook pass," the Seattle Star explained in October 1931. A state news roundup that September put the whole effort at "17 years of concerted effort of east and west side boosters" and the cost at "$4,500,000 in round figures," a figure this site found in only that one source.

The road climbed from Enumclaw through Greenwater and the White River valley, crossed into the northeast corner of Mount Rainier National Park, and topped out at Chinook Pass, about 5,430 feet, where Tipsoo Lake sits in a meadow below Naches Peak. By the late summer of 1931 it was nearly finished, and Enumclaw's chamber of commerce decided that the union of east and west deserved a ceremony.

Mr. Cream and Miss Peaches

The billing in the papers was "Miss Peaches of Yakima and Mr. Cream of Enumclaw." The version often repeated since, Enumclaw Cream marries Yakima Peach, is a later paraphrase of the same idea. The White Bluffs Spokesman announced on September 10 that "Miss Betty Hollom of Yakima is to be the bride," with bridesmaids from towns along the route. Who played Mr. Cream is a question this site could not answer: the Enumclaw paper for that month is not online, and none of the papers that are named him.

On Sunday, September 13, 1931, the crowd drove up. The Spokesman counted "Over 7,000." A federal engineering history of the road written in 1992, drawing on the park superintendent's reports, says "Nearly 5,000 people attended in spite of driving rain." Every account agreed the weather was bad, though the Spokesman described fog and the park's report driving rain.

The fog

The Spokesman's account four days later is the best thing written about the day, and it reads like a review. "In the first place," it began, "they failed to consult the weather man, with the result that a heavy fog hung over the lake and surrounding mountains, limiting visibility to not over 100 feet, chilling the crowd and interfering seriously with the program."

The wedding went ahead anyway. The fog prevented any motion pictures from being taken, so the promised movie debut for the bridesmaids never happened, and the paper observed that the gowns of the bride and her attendants seemed too frail to keep out the cold damp air. Then came the third complaint: "And in the third place, the celebration was held about six months too soon."

It was. The road had been opened a day early for the party, but it was not officially open. A state roundup eleven days later said the official opening was set for the next spring.

The actual opening

The highway opened to the public on June 15, 1932. On July 2 that year it was dedicated at Tipsoo Lake as the Mather Memorial Parkway, for Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, who had died in January 1930. Mather had suffered a stroke in November 1928, and a 1992 federal history of the parkway records that he struggled afterward to say the word "Cascades," about this road.

Two years later the park began building the log entrance arch that drivers still pass under at the pass, drawn by the Park Service's design branch in 1933 and built by the Civilian Conservation Corps between 1934 and 1936. The 1992 federal history of the arch includes one sentence that puts this town into the structure: "Cement and sand was hauled from Enumclaw, the nearest railhead, 45 miles from the project."

The road still keeps its own calendar

Chinook Pass has never been a year-round highway. WSDOT's records of opening and closing dates run back to 1935, and by this site's count from that table, the median opening falls around May 25 and the median closing around November 16. The latest opening on record was July 12, 1974, the earliest April 2, 2015, and in the winter of 1976 to 1977 it never closed at all. Last year the passes closed early, on October 24, 2025. "These roads close each winter because of hazardous conditions such as increased avalanche risk, lack of emergency services and limited snow storage," WSDOT said then. They reopened on May 22, 2026.

So nearly every year, around the third week of November, the marriage of Mr. Cream and Miss Peaches goes back to being a long-distance one, and every spring it resumes, usually around Memorial Day. The fog, some years, is still there.