North Cascades National Park Complex is actually three parks, the National Park (which is separated into a North and South unit) and Ross Lake and Lake Chelan NRAs. In addition, the lakes exist as a result of a hydroelectric project which produces a large portion of electricity for Seattle. As a result, staying in the campground we got a fun alarm every day at noon from the hydroelectric company. Our last day we got a second longer alarm at 12:40pm but no one could tell us what it meant and whether we needed to evacuate or not… so we didn’t, and hoped for the best.
Cascades is a beautiful park that sits right on the border of Canada. There are several glaciers still that can be seen, though many have completely melted now. There were tons of wildflowers in bloom while we were there and the park was under some maintenance rebuilding several bridges and roads that had been damaged over the winter. There is quite a bit of hiking and backpacking available in Cascades if you can hike 8 to 9 miles in a day. Unfortunately, the max our kids can do is in the range of 5 miles a day if we push it, but realistically more like 2 to 3 miles a day. The campsite had several smaller little walks around it, and we did a quick little one around the visitor center. The visitor center is still largely closed due to Covid. Only the gift shop portion is open which is unfortunate. We saw some neat looking taxidermy bears as well as a fun looking leather banana slug through the outside windows that we would’ve liked to see up close.
We were able to see the lakes and some waterfalls via the car and State Route 20 that bisects the North and South unit. This road follows around the lakes and has many turnoffs and overlooks. One such turnout had a bridge you could walk out onto and have a great view of a waterfall. It was the scariest bridge I’ve probably ever walked out onto despite being quite sturdy. The walking surface was just a grid with slots perfectly sized to lose your cell phone or car keys down. In addition, the barrier separating pedestrian side from car side was more substantial than the barrier separating the pedestrian side from the edge of the bridge. I did fine until I looked down. I refused to let Ben get close to the edge railing. James, who claims to be scared of heights and bridges, was jumping up and down like it was no big thing. Kids. Am I right? Andrew said he was stressed about losing the car keys and his camera lens cap the whole time. I don’t think we’ll be doing that one again.
The nice thing about Cascades, was the full LTE cell phone coverage LOL. Since there weren’t very many hikes we were able to do, and it was on the hotter side, we took the couple of days we were there and had some rest days. We read books, and played Lego, rode bikes in the campground, met some other kids. The small town also has a cute little playground with a retired train engine the kids loved to visit and play on. It was a nice relaxing break from all the driving we had been doing.
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