Checking out North Cascades National Park

Jul 13

A wild, free-flowing river, cold and clear. Forests thick with fir and spruce, some of the trees centuries old. Stunning wildflowers I had never seen. Birds to add to my life list. Craggy, almost painfully steep mountains, some still covered with snow.

Wild rivers and undisturbed mountains are of course high on my list of places where I like to be. A week in North Cascades National Park in Washington and the surrounding North Cascades did not disappoint.

The Cascade Range extends from northern California to British Columbia, the northernmost 100 or so miles called the North Cascades. This subrange is about as wide as its north-south extent, and is often called the American Alps because the mountains are steep - steeper than those in the Cascades to the south - and pocked with dozens of glaciers.

As they slowly grind their way over a slope, those glaciers produce tiny rock particles called rock flour that turn mountain lakes and rivers carrying glacial meltwater an appealing milky turquoise or milky blue color, as if to show off their wild origins.

My first day in the park I ascended two miles on the Thunder Knob Trail to an outlook - below me spread one of those turquoise gems, Diablo Lake, surrounded by snowy peaks.

Beside the trail were occasional colonies of Davidson’s penstemon, a low-growing, brilliantly purple plant that forms dense colonies, the flowers just big enough and colorful enough that they grab your attention. You can’t just walk by them; you want a closer look even if you have to get down on your knees.

North Cascades is a massive park - 505,000 acres - but not nearly so well known or visited as big name parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, Great Smoky Mountains or Acadia. It is mostly wilderness and comparatively lightly visited, as the national parks go.

Usually hiking alone, I never ventured more than three or four miles into the massive old forests. But I hiked just far enough to see, to get a feel for the North Cascades, to let nature envelop me.

Visiting a vast, wooded wonderland I was minimally familiar with - I’ve hiked and paddled in the northwest before, but I’m a long way from expert on the flora and fauna - I wanted to be alert, keep my eyes open, making sure I didn’t overlook what nature presented. With each trip, each exploration, we learn.

Early on another morning - chilly enough in late June that a thick fleece shirt was welcome over a base layer and long-sleeve shirt - I followed the Thunder Creek Trail, another stream tinted with glacial meltwater that flows through an ancient forest of Douglas fir and cedars, some of the firs easily six-feet or more in diameter. River on one side of the trail, deep, mature forest on the other. Stunning.

In a bit of serendipity the next morning, my wife, Susan, and I were seated beside a window at a diner just a few miles from the park’s Visitor Center. A foot or two outside the window was a hummingbird feeder, with a pair of hummingbirds zipping in and out. I quickly realized they were a species I did not recall seeing before. Snapped a photo, checked the field guide later and logged what we birders call a life bird. They were rufous hummingbirds, a male and a female, native to the Pacific Northwest and into British Columbia.

Passing over the crest of the North Cascades from the wetter west side of the range to the drier east side, we found the surrounding mountain peaks snow-covered, the wind blowing, snow all the way up to the very edge of the road. Before driving down the east slope of the range I hiked the Cutthroat Lake Trail, crossing ephemeral meltwater streams at times and trudging though snow as much as a foot deep at times - on a day that had suddenly become sunny and mild.

We stayed in a cabin on the Chewuch (say it she wuk) River with a porch literally overlooking a long stretch of whitewater in the town of Winthrop. All day, all night there was the soothing serenade of a robust river over rocks. A block or two away, the Chewuch merged into the Methow River (say it Meht How) a gorgeous free-flowing river that rises in the wilderness in and around North Cascades National Park and flows nearly 83 miles south on the east side of the North Cascade slope before it meets the mighty Columbia River.

It is clean, sprightly always, and fed in part by the glaciers. For me, paddling the Methow was a must.

Fortunately, right in Winthrop was an outfitter offering rafting and kayaking trips. I signed on for a trip that included a family that rode in a raft with a guide, while another kayaker and I paddled kayaks, also with a guide. For 7 miles we bounced our way through one class I or class II rapid after another, traveling through lightly forested terrain, equally lightly developed.

The guides strongly recommended that we paddlers wear wetsuits because of course there was a greater chance we’d flip over than the group in the raft - and the water was stinging cold with snowmelt, and running high.

Driving along a river is one thing. Paddling it is another. You feel the power of the river, its deceptive speed, delight in the spray of the cold, clean water as you knife through a rapid on a sunny day. I came to know the Methow, if only a piece of the Methow, at least as the river presented itself on one day in its centuries of existence. Delighted to know I am a piece of its history, however infinitesimal.

The next day, exploring in the Okanogan National Forest, I followed the Beaver Pond Trail outside of Winthrop, considered an excellent birding trail.

The birds indeed were abundant. But wildflowers were, if anything, even more abundant.

I recalled my watchwords; be alert to what nature presents.

Not only were there many species, many of them were new to me. A wildfire last year torched the trail in places - where I happened upon some especially showy wildflowers, even as I was trying to concentrate on the birding.

One of them I at first assumed was tiger lily in full bloom. Looking more closely, however, the blooms seemed smaller than the tiger lily I am familiar with in Connecticut, Lilium lancifolium, which is not native. So I looked online later, and discovered the plant I saw was Lilium columbium, Columbian lily, which, it turns out, also is sometimes known as tiger lily. It actually is native and found from California north into Canada, east to Montana. Very similar, but a different species. Glad I checked.

Nearby, was another grabber of a wildflower. I literally did a double take when I came upon this lady slipper - immediately recognizing it as some kind of slipper, but again, clearly not what I was used to in Connecticut - which is the especially showy pink lady’s slipper, one of my favorites. This slipper has, of course, a pink lip or pouch, shaped something like a moccasin, hence the name lady’s slipper. In the Cascades, however, the plant I came upon had a moccasin that was white with deep magenta veins, and is known as mountain lady’s slipper, Cypripedium montanum. The U. S. Forest Service says it often is found with species in habitat where fire is more common, which is exactly where I found it - near a stand of blackened trees, some of them dead.

Not that I struck out on the birds. Back near our cabin, hiking in habitat known in the Northwest as Shrub-Steppe - a hugely common landscape on the Cascade east slope that is thick with shrubs, grasses and wildflowers - I came upon another species new for me, though it is common-enough - California quail.

Watchwords or not, you can’t overlook a bird with a teardrop-shaped plume sticking out of the top of its head.