I had long heard of the legendary beauty of Cascade Pass when Marjorie and I finally had the opportunity to hike up to it in September 2022, on a two-night backpack trip. The trail in North Cascades National Park starts at the end of a twenty-three-mile dirt-and-paved road that parallels the Cascade River east from Marblemount, Washington, about thirty miles south of Canada. We began our hike in a steep-sided valley dotted with perched ice patches and rimmed by a cockscomb of rocky peaks. Thirty or so switchbacks took us 1,400 feet up through Douglas-firs, Alaska yellow cedars, and mountain hemlocks and brought us to a level where we could contour gently up through debris slopes and vegetated hillsides to reach the pass at 5,398 feet.

There we found an unexpected site: three NPS rangers dressed in bright-red jackets. They were waiting for a helicopter. No one was injured, the standard reason to wait for a helicopter in a national park. Instead, the helicopter was coming for a far more mundane reason, ferrying two 50-gallon metal drums, a shovel, and a sledgehammer for the once-every-few-years emptying of the pit toilet. Not everyone gets to experience such a changing of the guard.

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