Why It’s So Hard to Enjoy the Park

For those who expect their national parks to be vast expanses of stunning vistas and unspoiled wilderness, this park is different. While those features are here, it is very difficult to enjoy them without doing some serious backpacking.

An organization of mountaineers called Mazama started lobbying for national parkhood in the late 1800s. The area was national forest, and three hydroelectric dams were built to harness the power of the Skagit (rhymes with ‘gadget’) River from the 1930s to the 1950s, and still efforts continued to make it a national park. They were finally successful in 1968, but by then the three dams were in place (today they supply around ¼ of the power to Seattle), and the park was carved (rather awkwardly) out of the two recreational areas and the two national forests in the region. Turns out national forests and national parks have quite different goals. National forests are much more interested in managing the land for lots of uses (including camping, hiking, logging, and hunting, among other interests). National parks are more about preservation.

Because neither unit of the national park is near a road, the park itself is inaccessible unless you’re hiking – often a significant distance. We talked to one ranger who’s been here a month and hasn’t yet stepped foot in the park. The land along the only road, Route 20 (a.k.a. the Northern Cascades Highway), is technically the Ross Lake National Recreation Area. And the views of the park from this land are often intruded upon by huge power stanchions, power lines, and/or the dams. This may also be the reason why North Cascades National Park is the least-visited park in the system. Hundreds of thousands of people come to the two recreation areas a year, but in 2004 less than seventeen thousand of them actually traveled within the borders of the park itself.