Hollowfield, Washington
Population 812 · Elevation 1,240 ft · Snohomish County
The valley
Hollowfield sits in a side valley off the Mountain Loop Highway in eastern Snohomish County, Washington, at an elevation of 1,240 feet. Two ridgelines run roughly north to south on either side of it, close enough together that the valley floor loses direct sun by four in the afternoon for most of the winter.
The name is older than the town and nobody has satisfactorily explained it. The usual story is that it describes the valley, which is the sort of explanation that sounds complete until you notice the valley is not especially hollow. The Institute's own files contain three competing accounts and endorse none of them.
Population was 812 at the last count that bothered to distinguish Hollowfield from the surrounding census tract. It has been within a hundred of that number since 1961.
Getting there
The practical route is State Route 530 to Darrington, then the Mountain Loop Highway south, then a county road east for four miles. Darrington is twenty two miles west and is where you go for a pharmacy, a hardware store that is not Pruitt's, and anything that has to be posted. Seattle is a shade under two hours in good conditions, which the road is not, for about five months of the year.
The county road is paved to the town line and gravel past it. The Mountain Loop itself closes seasonally over the pass, which means that for part of every winter the only way in and out of Hollowfield is back the way you came.
No railway ever reached the valley. A spur was surveyed in 1901 and abandoned at the estimate stage, and that single decision is probably the whole explanation for what Hollowfield is. Towns the railway reached became towns. Towns it did not stayed the size they were.
What the town is
Main Street runs four blocks north to south. There is a general store, a diner that has been the Cascade since at least 1958, a motel with eleven rooms, a volunteer fire station, and a Grange hall that is used for almost everything else. The school consolidated with Darrington's in 1979 and the building is now the county road department's equipment shed.
The mill closed in 1974. That is the fact that explains the most about the town's shape: the population did not leave when it went, which is unusual, and the reasons people give for staying are not economic.
Hollowfield was established in 1887 as a logging camp and incorporated in 1904. It has never grown and it has never emptied.
The people who live here divide roughly in two. There are families who have been in the valley for three or four generations and are not especially talkative about it, and there are people who arrived within living memory for reasons they tend not to volunteer. Turnover is very low in both groups. Whatever else can be said about the place, people who decide to stay in Hollowfield stay.
The weather
The valley makes its own conditions and this is the part visitors notice first.
Fog forms on the valley floor overnight and can sit until midday with clear sky above it, which is ordinary radiation fog and happens in valleys everywhere. It is more persistent here than the surrounding terrain accounts for, and the county's own road reports treat Hollowfield as a separate advisory from Darrington twenty two miles away.
Sound behaves strangely between the ridges. A vehicle on the county road can be inaudible at half a mile and clearly audible at two. Locals give directions by what you can hear from where. The Institute has never claimed this is anything other than terrain, and has filed a great many reports that begin with somebody hearing something they could not place.
Annual rainfall is around 78 inches. It is cool, it is wet, and the cloud comes down to the road.
What gets reported here
The Institute's archive proper begins in 1947, but accounts from the valley are older than the filing system, and the early ones survive because newspapers printed them rather than because anyone kept a record.
The earliest the Institute has traced is from 1904, when a lumber crew working above Miller Ridge said a tall bipedal figure crossed their camp at dusk. The county papers ran it and treated it as an exaggeration, which was the standard handling for the next forty years. There is a 1923 account from near the old mine workings. There is a disappearance in 1940 that was never resolved, and which the Institute files as a disappearance rather than as a sighting, because that is what the record actually supports.
Filed reports from within fifteen miles of the town break down roughly like this:
- 1904 to 1940. Occasional accounts, all of them second hand by the time
they were written down, all dismissed as misidentified wildlife.
- 1941 to 1952. More of them, and better recorded. This is the period Ada
Merrick was collecting in an exercise book.
- 1953 to 1975. The founders' years, and the densest part of the file, which
says at least as much about there finally being somewhere to send a report as it does about the woods.
- 1976 to 2000. Fewer, steadily.
- 2001 onward. Fewer again.
The Institute has no settled explanation for the decline and has heard two offered often enough to record them. One is that the animals adjusted to a century of people. The other is that the observers got better at not seeing things, which is the less flattering reading and the harder one to rule out.
A third possibility, which the Institute considers at least as likely as either, is that a valley with a mill and eight hundred people generates more reports than a valley with no mill and eight hundred people, and that what declined was the number of men walking through the woods at four in the morning.
Why the founders met here
They met here because they lived here, which is a duller answer than the town's reputation would suggest and is the true one.
Eleven people came to a room above Pruitt's hardware store in the winter of 1953, and they came because Ada Merrick had spent four years quietly writing down other people's accounts in a school exercise book and had thirty one of them by then. What Hollowfield offered was not sanctuary or convergence. It was that everyone in the book lived within about an hour of the same crossroads, and that a valley of eight hundred people is small enough that Miss Merrick knew which door to knock on.
Isolation helped, but not mystically. A town with no through traffic and no newspaper is a town where eleven people can meet weekly for eighteen years without anyone finding it worth remarking on.
The building
Pruitt's Hardware still stands on Main Street and still sells hardware. The room above it, reached by an exterior staircase on the north side, was the Institute's meeting room from 1953 until the lease arrangement ended in 1971.
It is not open to the public and there is nothing in it.
Visiting
There is a motel, a diner and a general store, and all three would rather you came in the summer. The Mountain Loop is the reason most visitors are in the valley at all, and the trailheads are the reason to come.
The Institute has no visitor centre, no gift shop and no exhibit. Members are occasionally surprised by this. What exists is an archive, which is a filing system, and a filing system is not a destination.
If you do come: the forest here is genuinely difficult country. It is steep, the undergrowth is dense, the water is cold and moves faster than it looks, and people who leave the trail get lost within a few hundred yards. Every year the county fields calls from people who thought otherwise. The Institute's advice is the same as the county's, which is to stay on the trail and tell somebody where you went.