Discreet 24/7 Biohazard Remediation in Skykomish, WA

Skykomish is an incorporated town in northeastern King County, set on the South Fork Skykomish River along U.S. Route 2 and completely surrounded by the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest in the Cascade foothills.

The town takes its name from the Skykomish (Skai-whamish) tribe — the name means "upriver people" — who lived along the river long before the railroad arrived.

Skykomish grew out of "Maloney's Siding," settled by John Maloney, a guide for the Great Northern Railway's surveying team, as the railroad was being built through the valley toward Stevens Pass in the early 1890s; Maloney opened his general store there in 1893.

The town was officially incorporated on June 5, 1909.

From the 1890s until 1974, Skykomish was a maintenance and fueling station for the Great Northern Railway (today's BNSF Railway), and at its peak eight passenger trains a day stopped there, including the Empire Builder, the Oriental Limited, and the Western Star.

From 1928 to 1956, Skykomish was the western terminus of electric operations on the Cascade Tunnel route to Wenatchee, where steam and diesel locomotives were exchanged for electric ones for the trip through the tunnel.

The town's population peaked in the 1920s — estimates run into the thousands, as high as about 8,000 during the Cascade Tunnel construction era — but decades of railroad job losses shrank it to just 161 people in 49 households at the 2020 census.

Maloney's General Store, opened in 1893, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997, and the town's entire historic commercial district followed in 2000; the 1894 Great Northern Depot was moved to a new town park in 2012 and now serves as a visitor center and history museum.

Decades of railroad fueling left Skykomish's soil, groundwater, and river contaminated with oil and heavy metals, and a cleanup agreed by BNSF Railway and the state Department of Ecology in 2006 removed and replaced the tainted soil by 2009 — at an eventual cost of more than $100 million, with 22 buildings temporarily lifted and moved so the ground beneath them could be excavated.

Students at the local school documented the oil beneath their town in a video called "An Oily Sky," which won a 2001 Brower Youth Award and the 2002 President's Environmental Youth Award.