| North Cascades |
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INTRODUCTION
Washington's North Cascades rank as some of the country's wildest, most rugged, and beautiful mountains outside of Alaska. Their breathtaking scenery inspired the name the "American Alps," a description often used for other ranges in the United States, but one, their admirers stressed, the northern Cascades deserved without question. More importantly, perhaps, the North Cascades were considered "true wilderness." In the middle of the twentieth century, they were known mostly to mountaineers, and before that by a relative handful of explorers, miners, loggers, settlers, dam builders, and, of course, the Skagit peoples. The range's deep, glaciated valleys and jumble of precipitous, glacier-clad peaks formed a nearly impenetrable barrier to human progress. When it was officially opened in 1972, State Highway 20 was the first and only east-west road to cross the formidable country north of Stevens Pass. To this day, the isolated community of Stehekin, at the head of the fjord-like Lake Chelan, cannot be reached by road. By accident of geography, wilderness enthusiasts claimed, the North Cascades had escaped the forces that had shaped modern America.
In the aftermath of World War II, however, change did come and threatened to alter forever this magnificent country with clear cuts, mining operations, and motorized recreation. On October 2, 1968, after a lengthy and controversial struggle, Congress protected around 700,000 acres of this range, some of the nation's finest alpine wilderness, as North Cascades National Park. The political forces that led to the creation of the park can be seen in the park's physical form. It is a "park complex," composed of a national park (505,000 acres) made up of northern and southern units, and two national recreation areas. Ross Lake National Recreation Area (117,000 acres) is wedged between the park's northern and southern units. Lake Chelan National Recreation Area (62,000 acres) abuts the park's southern boundary. While there are specific differences in how these areas are managed, the park complex as a whole has the purpose of providing the American public a wealth of scenic, scientific, historic, and recreational opportunities in a wilderness environment.
The significance of North Cascades relates in large part to its mountainous geography. When the Cascade Range reaches northern Washington, its stately ridges transform into a bewildering array of uplifted and folded peaks. The mountain building process here was extremely complex, forming a series of seemingly unending peaks and troughs of deep, steep-sided valleys. These deep valleys, many of them carved out by glaciers, give the surrounding mountains an immensely dramatic relief, making them appear higher than they really are. Though not many peaks are above 9,000 feet, they rise above valley floors that are mostly under an elevation of 2,000 feet. The relief is so much greater than the higher peaks of the Sierra or Rockies, noted mountaineer Hermann Ulrichs, that it gives the North Cascades "a decidedly grander appearance." [1] The peaks of the Picket Range, with such ominous-sounding names as Challenger, Fury, and Terror, attest to this observation. Other striking topographic features of the northern Cascades are the volcanic cones of Mount Baker and Glacier Peak, more recent additions to the range, towering above it to the north and south respectively. Unlike Mount Rainier National Park, then, North Cascades National Park gains much of its significance not from a single volcano but rather from a "sea of peaks." It is this crown of jagged ridges, spires, and pinnacles that epitomizes the wilderness character of North Cascades.
The park owes its rugged topography and extreme relief to the glaciers and rivers that have deeply incised and shaped the North Cascades. More than three hundred glaciers, many of them small, remain active at the heads of valleys and make up the greatest concentration of glaciers in a national park outside of Alaska. The power of their erosive forces carved out such broad, U-shaped valleys as those of the Stehekin River and Little and Big Beaver and Thunder creeks, and created distinctive features such as hanging valleys with their cascading waterfalls. The park's two major watersheds, the Skagit and Stehekin rivers, are fed by the meltwater of glaciers and snow, rainfall, and the innumerable streams and creeks draining the mountains. The Skagit is the largest watershed in Puget Sound. This physical reality highlights the fact that the North Cascades form a striking boundary between climates; the west slope receives heavy -- and generally warm -- precipitation from the Pacific (from 84 to over 100 inches) while the east slope lies in a rain shadow (receiving about 30 inches a year).
Water, in all its various forms, is another of the park's popular and significant resources -- from the rivers and lakes clouded with glacier flour to the clear, alpine lakes and ponds (more than 200) in the park's high country. Four large bodies of water lie within the park's boundaries. Gorge, Diablo, and Ross lakes are reservoirs formed by dams on the Skagit River, and are located in Ross Lake National Recreation Area. Lake Chelan is a natural lake that extends for fifty-five miles through a narrow, glacier carved valley, rimmed by high peaks in the north that give way to lower and drier mountains in the south near Chelan. In the late 1920s, however, a hydroelectric dam at the foot of the lake raised the lake's level by twenty-one feet.
The wild country of the North Cascades is also biologically diverse. The park's two distinct climatic zones -- a wet and temperate western slope and a drier and colder eastern slope -- support a variety of flora. On the west side of the range, heavy stands of Douglas fir, western red cedar, and western hemlock dominate the lowland forest. At higher elevations, pacific silver fir, mountain hemlock, Alaska yellow cedar, and subalpine fir are the most common species. On the eastern side of the range, grand fir, Douglas fir, aspen, and ponderosa pine are the dominant trees in the forests at the lower elevations, while whitebark pine and subalpine larch are the most common at the higher elevations. On either side of the mountains, a wide variety of plants and vegetation, from ferns to flowering heather, can be found. More important, perhaps from a popular perspective, are the subalpine meadows or "mountain parks" that open up past the tree line. For many visitors, they are the high country's most characteristic feature.
The park's biological diversity extends to fish and wildlife, too. Native and introduced species of fish live in the park's lakes and rivers. Among the native fish are bull trout, cutthroat trout, and burbot; and among the introduced fish are rainbow and brook trout, and kokanee and Chinook salmon. The park's variety of habitats supports nearly 340 species of wildlife. Sightings of deer, black bear, mountain goats, and various small mammals and birds are common, whereas encounters with mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats, grizzly bears, and wolves tend to be far less common.
Together these features -- mountains, glaciers, rivers, lakes, flora, fish, and fauna -- compose North Cascades National Park's principal natural resources. They are also the source for the popular perception of the park's quality as a "true wilderness" in a modern age and within such close proximity to the Puget Sound's metropolitan corridor. This focus on the park's wilderness resources has tended to obscure the human story of the range's past. The park's cultural resources are diverse. The prehistory of the North Cascades, for example, reveals that perhaps within the last 5,000 years native people used the resources of the range on a seasonal and permanent basis. Similarly, studies suggest that the historic tribes of northwestern Washington, such as the Upper Skagit, Chilliwack, Lower Thompson, and Chelan, also exploited mountain resources traveling through the range's valleys and passes. In this respect, the North Cascades were thus not the unknown, impervious mountain range many whites of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries believed.
Evidence of Anglo American interaction with this rough landscape can be seen in the historic structures and sites that speak to early exploration, mining, homesteading, tourism, federal land management, and hydroelectric power development. Most of the activities associated with these structures were arduous undertakings. The range's extreme topography confined them to the major river valleys; they were transient in nature, and most left only reminders of their passing in silent mining operations and aging log cabins. However, some pursuits left a more permanent mark on the region, such as the Stehekin community at the head of Lake Chelan and the dams erected by Seattle City Light on the Skagit River. The wilderness of the North Cascades has not been an island in the stream of history, experiencing the occasional floods of interest. Here history has been, like the mountains, more a question of scale and perspective than magnitude.
http://www.nps.gov/noca/adhi-intro.htm