Today was an amazing day hiking and exploring the Pacific Northwest. We woke early and packed up after making coffee, and enjoyed a great sunrise driving into the North Cascades park. During the time of this writing the park itself is one of the most unpopular parks in the NPS, and because of that we did not have to pay an entry fee (even though we had our annual pass). However we still stopped for our stamp at the ranger stations and looked for a campsite. We decided that we could make it closer to another point by the end of the day.
The hike we decided to accomplish that day was …. and it was actually before the main visitor center coming from our campsite the night before. There was a rocky dirt road for about 10 miles to reach the trail head. When we reached the trailhead we gathered our belongings and took in the beautiful surroundings of untouched snow capped peaks. Once again since this is not a popular trail we had almost the whole mountains to ourself.
The trail starts with a steep ascent over jagged rocks and beautiful pines. We are at a point in the year that the temperature was cool but not too cold, which was perfect hiking weather, yet there were parts where we had to cross glaciers and snowy areas that were easy to slip on. There we many variations and branches of this trail, but that primary overlook was the goal to get to, and it was surreal. The gorge of the mountains was seen in the overlook, and it was worth the 3 mil hike.
We paused to soak in the beauty as we always do, and then decided to take the trail further to a glacier lake overlook. The overlook of the lake was an incredible blue glacially fed lake that in the day looked like deep azure. To reach this it took about another mile from the previous overlook we reached. I had an idea to get to the bottom and spend some time there but once we started the downward decent we lost the trail and didn’t want to tackle the slope if it wasn’t a designated trail. We then decided to head back to the car and continue with our daily goal.
Since our goal for the day was to just see this park, we decided to drive through it heading east. There are many overlooks of amazing blue lakes and even short hikes that bring you to pristine overlook. One can spend a day here doing that alone, and during the later day the sun is setup perfectly behind you to give you the best lighting of the mountains as you travel along this scenic drive. OVerall since this was one of the less busy parks, I thought it was one of my favorite as we had most of the landscape to ourselves.
After getting out of the park, we stumbled into this town called Winthrop, and what a pleasant surprise this turned out to be! We found a campsite at a local state run park, which was situated around a lake. This campsite was called…. and though it was expensive ($30) we were able to take a nice shower and then go into town to see the old western styled buildings. This town reminded me of Tombstone Arizona, as everything had been setup to be an old western feel, with antique buildings that had been revamped. It was quite obviously a tourist town, but had such a great local feeling to it, I considered it to be a great experience. We had beer at a local brewery and also Ice cream at a local candy shop, which seemed to be the local hangout spot. After the sun went down to the point of dusk, we headed to the campsite to cook dinner and get ready for the next day. Overall this was the perfect day as we explored new places and never felt much rush along the route.
DAILY EXPENSES
7$ camping
14.95 gas
11.37 breakfast
3.75 coffee
42 lunch
28 camping
14 beer
10.82 ice cream
Total – 131.89