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Contact
Jim: jdipeso@rep.org
(253) 740-2066 / 2011
Archive / 2010
Archive
A Hidden Treasure in the Cascades
August 20, 2010
North
Cascades National Park in north central Washington State is one of the
least visited among the nearly 400 parks, monuments, recreation areas,
seashores, and other units of the National Parks System. In 2007, the
park received fewer than 20,000 visitors, the fewest of any park that
can be reached on dry land in the lower 48 states.
A reason is that in our motorized society, there is no way to reach the
park by road. You have to enter the adjacent Ross Lake National
Recreation Area and hike in.
 Local
conservationists have floated a proposal to
expand the
684,000-acre park nearly 45 percent by incorporating adjacent land now
managed by the Forest Service and a section of the Ross Lake recreation
area.
One of the goals is to bring the park closer to visitors, by including
a state highway corridor that bisects the current park’s northern and
southern sections and adding lowland forests and watersheds, which also
would serve as protected habitat for salmon, bears, mountain goats,
wolves, and other species. A spin-off benefit would be injecting more
tourist dollars into gateway communities.
The
idea is to add
watersheds and wild lands left out when Congress established the park
in 1968, one of the many conservation achievements of Congressman John
Saylor, the combative Pennsylvania Republican who relentlessly
championed parks and wilderness.
 The
north Cascades
region is called the American Alps, and there is a
good reason for the nickname. Trails in the proposed addition east of
the Cascades crest offer spectacular views of craggy peaks,
high-elevation meadows, and year-round snowfields that bring to mind
the montane ambiance of Switzerland, the Italian Lake District, and
Austria’s Tirol.
The American Alps, however, are wilder. There are no chateaus,
funiculars, ski resorts, or fashionable tourist spots. In the heart of
the backcountry, it’s pack it in, pack it out, and leave the cell phone
at home because there is not a chance of picking up a signal.
Expanding the park into lowland forests, however, would offer some
recreation opportunities for visitors who are not up for a remote hike
or backpacking trip. The proposal includes visitor centers and day-hike
trail loops that would take tourists to hidden waterfalls and offer a
chance of glimpsing forest wildlife.
Expanding the park is not likely to result in visitor hordes similar in
number to those who crowd into Yosemite or the Smokies. North Cascades
is too far off the beaten path, in a remote area reachable by a
two-lane road that is closed nearly half the year because of prodigious
snowfall. Still, bringing its boundaries a bit closer to people would
give more of them a chance to sample its treasure chest of visual
delights.
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