On the Road-North Cascades;Skagit Co. WA

August 22, 2009
Northern Cascades-the Stepchild of the National Parks—or—Don’t pee on the Heather.
We drove up to Skagit and booked a cabin in a “resort” called Clark’s Skagit Cabins and RV hookups in the mountains. The founding family, all of whom remain here today (in the middle of nowhere) had a mill and used to house their workers in these cabins. Linoleum floors and handmade curtains, they are clean and have no odors including artificial sprayed scents. There is no maid service during ones stay; and all you can do is place your used wet towels on the porch and any empty rolls of toilet paper or paper towels that you want replaced.

The Skagit resort community appears to be enormous. You can walk for a long time and find different housing, old rusted metal vehicles and tools, sheds for wood, bikes, chairs. On one trail, I came upon 3 mobile homes permanently moored to the land. One had a horse in its yard with surveyer type sticks and rope to serve as a tiny corral. ;There is an enormous round concrete edifice which is probably for collecting water. I tripped over a couple of rabbits that must be pets—a black one and a white one. Across the road is a tiny chapel. It is very little bigger than a kid’s play house. Plastic flowers are planted outside the chapel. The door opened for me and inside were extremely short in length pews and a little table in the front that held a book of a service.

There are no fancy visitor centers here or ranger led walks. We asked the ranger for suggested hikes but he directed us to short walks on level land. There seem to be very many less visitors here. Rangers seem to be mainly there to issue back country camping permits. We waited while 2 young men in front of us got very detailed instructions which including preserving the delicate forest growth. One piece of this information was “don’t pee on the heather because acid in the urine is harmful.”

We drove then to the town of Winthrop. On the way we went up four thousand plus feet and saw the most varied and incredible views. This park might be the best for all of its varied mountain views and how one can drive right up to snow patches left on mountains. As we approached the town of Winthrop we dropped to almost sea level and it got much hotter. Before entering Winthrop we saw a big campground housing a Woodstock revival with some of the same performers. Winthrop when we arrived, appeared to be the cowboy town that I had been promised. However there had been a power failure and most restaurants and stores were closed. It was hot so we turned the car around and returned to our Clark’s Skagit Cabins. We had a bad dinner at their restaurant and then situated ourselves in our cabin for the night.