Author: Occidental

After hiking in the North Cascades for two days without actually making it into the national park, we ventured further along highway 20 and spent our third day in the park. Besides highway 20 there are a few other access points to North Cascade National Park, but overall, even more so than most national parks, if you don’t get on the trail and take a hike or backpack trip you aren’t going to see very much here. We had pondered a backpack trip during our planning, but a couple weeks out from departure the available overnight permits were pretty few and far between. We could either backpack in as far as we could day hike (too short), or we could pack in 20 plus miles (too long). We opted for day hikes instead.

We headed to the Thunder Creek trail and up the drainage we went.

North Cascades, Olympic, Rainier: Washington's national parks are situated in a way that suggest a road trip tour of all three making a big loop around northwest Washington. After a bit of planning we set off to do just that on the last day of July. After a drive through the hot, dry, baked brown, eastern portion of Washington we arrived in the foothills of the North Cascades and set up a base camp near…