This park, east of Seattle, is the wildest of all
the Pacific Northwest wildernesses, often called the American Alps. Thanks to their impregnability, the North
Cascades were inaccessible to humans until relatively recently. The first road was built across the region in
1972. There is very little in the way of
settlements and while the road through it is very good and very scenic, the
park is, with its wildness and ruggedness, a real hiker’s paradise. The range has the highest concentration of
glaciers in the US.
The town of Concrete, one of the first mileposts one comes to after leaving the coast, is named for the material it produced from the 1930s to the 1950s when it functioned as a company town. Most of its public buildings are still made of concrete. Could not resist taking a photo of its welcome emblem :-)
Beautiful Diablo Dam comes next. The green-blue colour of the water in the lake is the result of rock flour. These suspended particles of fine glacial sediments are washed down from the high country.
The Washington pass overlook at 5,477ft is the
highest point on the North Cascades Highway and here you get a superb view of
the Cascade peaks.
We met an Australian couple roughly our age from the NSW Central Coast at the park's visitors centre and spent some time chatting to them and their son who is living in Portland, Oregon for a year. They are just at the tail end of a two year trip and their adventures - including back-packing in South America - make us look like timorous travellers :-) And here I was thinking of ourselves as intrepid ones.
Capturing this squirrel, industriously gathering what looks like a small pine cone, was made possible by the sports mode on the camera, but it is a little hazy. The squirrel was going back and forth, regular as clock work across the car park we were at, picking up these tasty morsels to take back to its nest.
A cute little pika nibbling on a plant.
No comments:
Post a Comment