“Fire in the Hole!”

In 1908, a Milwaukee contractor named Johnson needed to blast out a path through the rock face next to the Barnes Creek Trestle, #218. Blasters chiseled out five “coyote holes”, stuffed them with 25,000 pounds of blasting powder, and touched it off.

In a fraction of a second, a gigantic blast threw tons of rock and car-sized boulders down the slope and onto Excavation Camp #1 below. No one was seriously injured or killed but most of the camp was smashed.

Across the valley, some of those huge boulders can still be seen scattered on the hillside below the tall rock cliff face that quickly became known as “Johnson's Big Cut.”