- A generous land donation and the hard work of community activists has ensured that Squak Mountain State Park will be an enduring piece of wilderness close to the homes of millions of urban residents.
To know the land, one must feel it out inch by inch with the feet.
Harvey Manning
- The bedrock of Squak Mountain is made up of rocks that formed from sediments carried by rivers into an ancient coastal estuary, where their increasing weight caused the land to sink, only to be buried by even more sediments. In time, the sedimentary layers accumulated more than one mile of thickness. As the sediments slowly collected, sub-tropical forests flourished on the landscape. Trees died and were buried before they began to decay, slowly converting into peat. Further burial and heat, possibly from regional molten magma intrusions in the Cascade Mountains, reduced the water, methane and carbon dioxide in the peat, and changed it into coal. The coal seams are found today in a layer of sedimentary rocks that geologists have named the Renton Formation.
- The coal seams in the Renton Formation at Squak Mountain were identified as a possible source of commercially viable coal as early as 1859, but large-scale operations didn’t begin until rail transportation reached the area in 1887.
- Coal mines were the primary employer in the city of Issaquah (which also took its name from the Indigenous placename) at the beginning of the 20th century, with laborers ranging in age from 14 to over 70.
- Tectonic action that continues to the present has wrenched the layered rocks into an uplifted arch that geologists call an anticline, which forms the string of foothill peaks now known as Tiger Mountain, Squak Mountain and Cougar Mountain.