North Cascades in the Seattle Times
Visiting a national park in Washington while enjoying a modicum of solitude has become a logistical feat: This summer, Mount Rainier National Park requires timed-entry reservations for Sunrise and Paradise, while visitors to Olympic National Park highlights like the Hoh Rainforest and Hurricane Ridge often endure multihour waits.
But hiding in plain sight is a third option if “national park” is on your summer bingo card: North Cascades.
Washington’s most recently established national park, founded in 1968, is also our least popular, seeing a fraction of the visitors of its peers. The proof is in the putting — up the tent, that is. When a college friend recently visited from the East Coast clamoring for an early season backpacking trip, we pulled off the seemingly impossible: a fair-weather weekend campout completely to ourselves in a national park.
On a warm, dry Friday in May, we had our pick of North Cascades backcountry campsites and spent a rejuvenating night out along Thunder Creek, a roaring stream that empties into Diablo Lake. The hummingbird-sized mosquitoes were the only drawback to an otherwise blissful two days on the trail, during which we saw fewer than a dozen hikers, all within a mile of the trailhead.
While I can’t promise similar seclusion during the peak summer season, I can promise lighter crowds than at the state’s other national parks — no tour buses toting the cruise ship crowd, no lines of cars waiting to get through the gate.
That’s intentional. North Cascades is short on so-called “windshield wilderness,” where you can drive right up to the most scenic spot, and long on actual wilderness, which is the park’s raison d’être as conceived largely by Seattle-area environmentalists. What North Cascades National Park lacks in full-service lodges, grandiose visitors centers, and name-brand attractions, it makes up for with breathtaking biological diversity, vast vertical relief and the most glaciers in the Lower 48.
“This is a park where you have to work a little bit to encounter what it has to offer,” said Christian Martin of the North Cascades Institute. “It was conceived of as a wilderness park and designed so that the best aspects of the park were going to be accessed by boot, boat and climber’s rope.”
A trip into North Cascades National Park isn’t the easiest, but that’s the point.
Read the rest of Scrugg’s excellent article and a “Eight North Cascades National Park adventures for this summer” list at seattletimes.com. Top photo of Sahale Arm at Cascades Pass by John D’Onofrio.