North Cascades national park is an interesting park. What looks like a single park on a map is actually two halves of a national park and two national recreation areas managed as a single unit. The primary route into the park complex is on Washington Hwy 20 which runs through Ross Lake National Recreation area. Ross Lake NRA actually splits the North Cascades national park into two pieces.
There is only a single road which will actually take you into North Cascades National Park. It is a winding 25 mile winding dirt and gravel road. I know this firsthand because I rode my Harley down it and barely survived to tell the tale. Most of the park is only accessible via backpacking trails.
The scenery in the park is beautiful. Granite and marble mountains carpeted in pine, fir, cedar and hemlock. A ranger last night mentioned that the park nearly qualifies as a rainforest. Everything is incredibly green and covered in moss.
The downside of camping in and biking through a nearly-rainforest is that you are bound to get wet. I was expecting a little bit of moisture because I had checked the weather forecast from Coeur D'Alene. There was supposed to be a small chance of morning showers but everything was supposed to clear up by the afternoon.
Well there were definitely morning showers, but the weather didn't clear up until well into the evening. It never really rained all that hard; most of the time it was little more than a drizzle. The clouds were so low coming through the mountains it's almost as if it weren't really raining but you were just feeling the moisture from being amongst the clouds. I felt like I got a good taste of genuine Washington weather (although I was assured by several people that it is usually very dry in Washington in August).
The moisture didn't keep me from hiking. I hiked nearly 8 miles yesterday across two different trails. The first trail was just across the street from my campground and took me up to a view point of Diablo Lake. The second trail took me through several miles of mossy forest to a hidden lake called pyramid lake. The lake was really more of a pond than a lake but it was still pretty cool.
Ironically I was able to stay dry all morning until I started hiking. My rain gear kept me pretty dry on the bike. However, once I got on the trail my jeans just sucked all of the water off of the surrounding plants as I walked by. By the time that I made it to pyramid lake my jeans were soaking wet and my shoes were sloshing. It was fun :)
The pyramid lake hike was the first of two times that I got soaking wet yesterday. After the hike I headed into two to find some food, gas and firewood. As I was riding around I actually managed to dry out my jeans but my boots were a little more stubborn. Before returning to camp for the night I decided to ride the Cascade River Road into the official North Cascades National Park. I got about 25 miles down the road before it started raining again. I didn't even bother putting on my rain gear bottoms this time. I still damp from earlier in the day and figured that it wouldn't matter all that much. I was already planning on changing into dry clothes once I got back to camp. I was more concerned about the firewood that I had just bought getting wet.
Despite the wet firewood I was able to start a fire last night. I would be pretty proud of that if it weren't for the fact that I had to burn nearly half a ream of paper to get the wood to finally dry out and catch fire. I almost gave up several times. But the thought of leaving my campsite with unburned firewood in the firepit was just too much for me to bear.
Both nights that I've been here there has been a ranger program in a little amphitheater in the campground. It's actually a pretty high tech setup with a large projection screen hooked up to a computer running a powerpoint presentation. Normally I would complain about the use of technology in a campground, but considering that I am sitting and typing on my laptop right now I'm not sure that I have the right to complain.
The program the first night was on Wolves. This is of particular interest to me since I just had a conversation/debate about this a week ago with one of my co-workers. The park ranger tried his damnedest to show how cute and cuddly the wolf was while leaving out all the parts about it being a cold blooded killer. I felt very propagandized by the time that he was done. It wasn't even very good propaganda, his presentation was full of logical fallacies. For instance, to prove how safe wolves are he started the presentation by telling everyone that there had only been one wolf attack on humans in the last 100 years (last year in British Columbia). I pointed out that the wolf population had been hunted to near extinction in the last hundred years and therefore was unlikely to even encounter humans much less attack. The ranger just kind of ignored me and pressed on. I'm not saying that wolves can't be cute and cuddly or that they deserve to be exterminated, but I think that it's irresponsible to ignore the fact that wolves can be quite dangerous.
The second night the program was on bears. There was actually quite a bit of useful information in this presentation. Most interesting I thought was how research was being done on how bears hibernate to help understand and correct human health problems. There are several fascinating things about how bears hibernate. First, most animals that hibernate totally shut their bodes down and bring their body temperature to just a couple of degrees above ambient temperature. Bears on the other hand only drop their body temperature about 10 degrees. Bear kidneys switch into an alternate mode when they are hibernating and recycle all of the waste that comes through them. Bears do not eat, urinate or defecate while they are hibernating yet they are still able to grow muscle. Humans on the other hand will start to break down muscle tissues after just a couple of days of inactivity.
The only thing that bothered me about the bear presentation was dual attitude that the ranger seemed to have. On the one hand he was telling everyone how dangerous bears were and that you should never leave out food because it would attract bears. On the other hand, when I asked him why the park didn't have bear boxes in the campgrounds like most other national parks, he just kind of danced around it and said that most people just store food in their cars. A lot of good that does for people like me who ride in on motorcycles, bicycles or hike into the park.
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