North Cascades

I keep coming back to one strange fact about the North Cascades: barely anyone goes. It is a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Seattle, it holds more glaciers than anywhere in the lower forty-eight, and its peaks are as fierce as anything in the Alps I grew up beside — yet Lia and I drove the highway through the heart of it on a golden August afternoon and shared the road with almost no one. We pulled over again and again, just to stand and stare. At one overlook a marmot sat unbothered on the guardrail, watching us watch the mountains, as if we were the curiosity.

Diablo Lake

The image everyone eventually sees of this park is Diablo Lake, and no photograph prepares you for the colour of it. Glacial rock ground to a fine flour, suspended in the meltwater, turns the whole reservoir an unreal milky turquoise, ringed by black forested peaks still streaked with snow in high summer. We stood at the overlook on Highway 20 as clouds dragged their shadows across the water, and the lake shifted from jade to teal to a pale, luminous blue. Lia kept saying it couldn’t be real. I took a hundred photos and none of them believed it either.

Cascade Pass

The next morning we hiked up to Cascade Pass, the classic walk of the park, switchbacking through cool forest before bursting out into open meadow beneath a horseshoe of glaciated summits. From the pass we could see the Cascade River valley falling away one direction and, the other, the broken ice of the Sahale Arm glinting above. We sat and ate our lunch as an avalanche let go somewhere across the valley — a distant white roar that took a full second to reach us. A pika squeaked from the rocks. Wildflowers everywhere. It was, without exaggeration, one of the finest half-days of walking I have ever done.

Washington Pass and the High Road

Highway 20 itself, the North Cascades Scenic Byway, is half the reason to come. On our last day we drove east, climbing to Washington Pass where the road hairpins beneath the sheer red-gold spire of Liberty Bell Mountain. We walked the short overlook trail and stood on a lip of rock with the whole valley plunging away below, the highway a thin grey thread far beneath us, the peaks marching off into blue distance. The light was going amber. Lia leaned into me against the cooling wind, and we stayed until the first star came out over the mountains that almost nobody bothers to visit.

Getting There

The North Cascades lie in northern Washington, reached by Highway 20 — the North Cascades Scenic Byway — which runs east from the town of Sedro-Woolley, about ninety minutes north of Seattle. Note that the high stretch of the road over the passes closes with the snows, roughly November to May, so summer and early autumn are the seasons to come. There are no services inside the park core; fuel up and stock up in Marblemount to the west or Winthrop to the east. We stayed in the tiny riverside village of Newhalem and had the wilderness almost entirely to ourselves, which is exactly how the North Cascades should be met.