North Cascades National Park
State Route 20
Marblemount, WA
A jagged, ice-hung range that earns its nickname the American Alps, holding more glaciers than anywhere else in the country outside Alaska.
North Cascades National Park protects some of the most rugged mountain country in the United States, a wilderness of knife-edged peaks, deep forested valleys, and ice so extensive that the range is nicknamed the American Alps. Within its boundaries lie more than three hundred glaciers, more than any other national park outside Alaska, feeding cold rivers and startlingly colored lakes.
What surprises most visitors is how wild it stays. There is no road through the park's core, so the mountains are reached mainly on foot, and yet the whole thing sits only a couple of hours from Seattle. The one road that comes close, the North Cascades Highway, threads the edge of the park and delivers one of the great scenic drives in the country.
What Guests Love
- Jagged, glacier-draped peaks that look more like the Alps than the Lower 48
- The unreal turquoise of Diablo and Gorge lakes, colored by glacial rock flour
- One of the most scenic drives in America along the North Cascades Highway
- Deep wilderness and quiet even though it sits close to Seattle
Worth Knowing
- The North Cascades Highway over the passes closes for winter, usually roughly November into spring, so check road status
- This is genuine wilderness with few roads and services, so come prepared and fuel up before you enter
- The best hiking window is short, roughly midsummer into early fall once the high country melts out
- Weather makes its own rules here and the peaks are often in cloud, so build in flexibility
Details
Marblemount, WA
Learn about North Cascades National Park
A range of ice and rock
The North Cascades are young, steep, and heavily glaciated, a tangle of sharp summits and hanging valleys carved by ice over and over through the ages. The park holds more than three hundred glaciers, a concentration unmatched anywhere else in the contiguous states, and those glaciers grind the underlying rock into a fine powder called rock flour.
That rock flour is why the lakes glow. When glacial meltwater carrying suspended flour fills the reservoirs of the Skagit River, the tiny particles scatter light and turn the water a vivid turquoise, most famously at Diablo Lake. It is a living, working landscape of ice and stone, still being shaped, though the glaciers here, like glaciers everywhere, are shrinking as the climate warms.
The North Cascades Highway
For most visitors the park begins with a drive. The North Cascades Highway, State Route 20, runs along the park's southern edge past Newhalem, the Skagit lakes, and a string of pullouts and short trails, climbing over Rainy and Washington passes into the drier country beyond. It is often called the state's most scenic highway, and the Diablo Lake overlook is one of the most photographed spots in the Northwest.
The road was completed over the passes in the early 1970s, a hard-won route through country that had resisted a highway for decades, and it still closes every winter when the snow piles too deep to keep it plowed. When it reopens in spring, the drive from the forests of the west side to the ponderosa pine of the Methow Valley on the east is a crossing of two different worlds.
A homeland and a hard-won park
These mountains and valleys are the ancestral lands of Coast Salish and Interior Salish peoples, including the Skagit and their neighbors, who traveled and traded through the passes and fished the salmon rivers long before any road. Their presence here reaches back thousands of years and continues today.
The park itself is more recent. After a long conservation campaign to protect the range from logging and dams, North Cascades National Park was established in 1968, together with the Ross Lake and Lake Chelan national recreation areas that flank it. The pairing is deliberate: the recreation areas hold the reservoirs and the highway corridor, while the park proper stays wild and largely roadless.
Wildlife and the short mountain summer
The park is one of the wildest corners of the Lower 48, home to black bears, mountain goats picking across the crags, deer, and a rare roster of predators that can include wolverine and the occasional grizzly in the wider ecosystem. Marmots whistle from the high meadows, pikas gather grass among the rocks, and eagles and hawks ride the winds off the peaks.
The high country's season is brief. Snow lingers into summer, and the prime window for hiking the alpine trails is roughly late July through September, when the meadows bloom and then blaze into fall color before the snow returns. Lower valleys and the highway corridor open earlier, but the mountains keep their own short calendar.
Closest Boutels
The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.
Things to Do Near Marblemount
Diablo Lake
Along Highway 20
The park's signature turquoise reservoir, best seen from the Diablo Lake Overlook, with boat tours and trails around the glacier-fed water.
Stehekin
At the head of Lake Chelan
A tiny roadless village reached only by boat, floatplane, or foot at the north end of Lake Chelan, a rare pocket of off-the-grid life inside the park's recreation area.
Winthrop
Over the passes to the east
A frontier-themed town in the sunny Methow Valley, a hub for hiking and biking in summer and cross-country skiing in winter, on the dry side of the mountains.