US-2 Stevens Pass

US‑2 is the northern of Washington's year-round Cascade crossings, and the harder one: 4,061 feet at the summit — a thousand feet above Snoqualmie — on a two-lane mountain highway instead of a six-lane interstate. It is also the road people most want in winter: the Stevens Pass ski resort sits directly on the summit, and Leavenworth's Bavarian village anchors the east side, so storm-weekend traffic meets storm-weekend snow head-on.

The corridor's defining hazard is avalanche control. US‑2 crosses dozens of slide paths — one of WSDOT's cameras here is named for the Old Faithful avalanche zone — and the state closes the highway on short notice to shoot and clear them, typically after big storm cycles. Below the pass, Tumwater Canyon adds a second closure point: the stretch between the summit and Leavenworth closes for slides and washouts, most recently for much of winter 2025–26 after an atmospheric-river storm tore out sections of the roadway.

The cameras run west to east under the live WSDOT pass-report banner. One gap in the strip is real, not a glitch: past Sultan, WSDOT has no cameras for roughly twenty miles, so coverage picks up again at Skykomish, climbs through the avalanche zones to the summit, and drops through Tumwater Canyon to Leavenworth. The restriction ladder is the same one Snoqualmie uses — traction tires advised, traction tires required, chains on everything except AWD, chains on all vehicles.