ABOUT THE BOOK The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche By Gary Krist Henry Holt, 251 pp., $26

That's what happened in 1910 along a treacherous railroad passage in Washington's Cascade Mountains, where a record-setting blizzard stranded a loaded passenger train and a first-class-mail train.

Both trains were snowbound at the isolated cliff-edged Wellington depot for an anxiety-filled week before warming temperatures, gusting winds and a rare thunder-and-lightning storm touched off a devastating avalanche of historic proportions.

The half-mile-wide slab of rumbling ice, snow and dangerous debris crushed both trains, sweeping them down the mountainside and killing nearly 100 passengers and railroad workers. Dozens of others were injured.

In his first excursion into non-fiction after three novels (Bad Chemistry, Chaos Theory and Extravagance), Gary Krist pieces together court transcripts, corporate records, newspaper reports and personal accounts into a gripping man-vs.-nature narrative of the deadliest avalanche in American history.

Through straightforward storytelling, Krist paces this ominous tale to fuel suspense, even though the reader knows from its first page the final destination.

From first snowflake to the dramatic rescues, the author populates the story with lives of people that were ended or changed forever:

•The never-say-die railway superintendent James O'Neill, who struggled around the clock to keep the trains moving but couldn't.

•Passengers such as Ida Starrett, who survived buried in snow for hours pinned on top of her dead baby, and salesman Ned Topping, who didn't survive but whose letters from the trapped train to his mother did.

Krist detours here and there into required background reading that creates historical context, but the interruptions also suspend suspense.

Perhaps weather fanatics can't get enough meteorological details, and train buffs may be mesmerized by pages of social and economic history of turn-of-the-century railroads and the "robber barons" who built them.

But most readers will be relieved each time the author gets the story back on track heading toward the avalanche itself.

And it's a testament to Krist's otherwise crisp and compelling recounting of this largely untold story that readers will plow through those occasional obstacles to reach the tragic end.

Enlarge By Emily Montjoy Gary Krist piles on the suspense in The White Cascade.