A Loop of Washington’s National Parks | North Cascade National Park

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.

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A Loop of Washington’s National Parks | Off to the North Cascades

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…

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Touring the Ice Age Floods of Washington, Part 2

After an evening watching the sandhill cranes, and a night of listening to coyotes we were back on the road from Potholes Reservoir heading north to see more pieces of the Ice Age Floods puzzle. Our first stop of the day was the Ephrata Fan. We were essentially working ‘upstream’ following the floods, and the Ephrata Fan is an alluvial fan of sorts where massive debris settled after being ripped out of the basalt as the Grand Coulee was formed. There is a mixture of house size basalt rocks and Volkswagen sized granite boulders spread out for miles across the fan. Yet another testament to the power and volume of water that these floods contained.

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