Thursday, November 4, 2010

Rare Sunny November Day in the Northern Cascades

Today we had the last day of three days of sunshine. This many consecutive days of sun is very unusual up here at this of the year. It was interesting to hear people commenting on the joy of "November sunshine". Everyone was talking about the wonderful weather, and everyone was finagling ways to get outside and stay outside. It was actually 66 degrees yesterday afternoon. When we saw the forecast, we immediately began planning outdoor activities. One of them was to return to the lower elevations of the Northern Cascades and do some easy short hiking before the area snows moved down into lower elevations and closed the main road through these mountains.

Snow has begun at elevations over 4000 feet, and one day a couple of weeks ago we looked up at the mountains that ring the farmland valleys and found new visible snow. It was as if the mountains had gone into their closets, found their pure white winter coats and put them on. The change was that obvious, that startling, and that sudden. We realized that if we didn't take advantage of these sunny days with relatively high temperatures that the opportunity to revisit this area before we left Washington was going to be gone.

I think the most interesting scenery I saw today was a trail of cedars. Now, Washington cedar trees are not Texas hill country cedar trees. Some of the oldest ones I saw today were a couple of hundred feet high, and several feet in diameter. It was almost a disconnect for me to look down at the ground and see the cedar needles on the ground that look exactly like the needles off the cedar BUSHES in Texas. In Washington, you can't even put your arms around the trunks of the cedars, and the cedar branches start so high up that you have to look straight up directly up into the sky. I loved this trail because it had SIGNS. I love trails that have informational signs. Today I got a bunch of trees identified, and learned what happens after an area of forest experiences a fire. I won't bore you with all I learned, but it was the best kind of trail. All the maples and other deciduous trees have shed their leaves, so while walking this trail, our feet made that shush, shush sound as our feet shuffled through the fallen leaves. And it smelled like autumn today - crisp and clean with wiffs of decomposing leaves.

Another interesting facet of today was we got to see Newhalem which is a town founded in 1922 in the middle of the Cascade Mountains. It was built to house the work force that was imported to build a series of three dams on the Skagit River. (Yes, this is 'our' Skagit River that runs through Burlington.) I found out that this river starts at the Canadian border and empties into the Puget Sound. Today Newhalem is one street of 'company houses', a general store, a community center, and a resident artist who has designed a 'power temple' inside the town park. There's a restored locomotive as a tourist magnet. The preferred landscape method in front of the houses is to use different kinds of trees in interesting patterns. This place is a bizarre combination of tourist attraction and people who actually work and live in the middle of this wilderness to run the power plants and maintain the dams built in the 1920's. North Cascade National Park envelopes these dams and this town. This 'town' is less than a mile long and sandwiched between Highway 20 (one of the few roads up there) and the Skagit River. They've built a great suspension bridge over the river and it was super fun to walk across.

It is so quiet in these mountains once you get off that one main highway, it's instantly relaxing. There is so much vegetation that the oxygen levels are elevated and the air up here makes hiking such a pleasure. We did one trail through an old growth forest down to the river. As an afterthought, we took a 300 foot boardwalk trail right beside the Visitor's Center (which is already closed for the winter) and stumbled into a view of the Pickett mountain range. This is the most wild area of the Northern Cascades and is utterly without any trails. This range is a string of mountains that are about 7000 feet tall. These mountains weren't even traversed by alpine climbers until 1963! Even today, only the most experienced climbers go into this part of the park. If you want to see all the pictures from this day trip, click on the following link and scroll through the pictures until you see River Loop Trail - that's where today's pictures start.
This was a great day. We've almost into countdown of the days we have left up here now. We are leaving at the end of the month with extremely mixed feelings. I'm so glad we got to enjoy the Northern Cascades one more time. I think we are getting ready to experience the typical autumn northwestern rainy weather - the next 10 days' weather forecast - no hint of any sunshine whatsoever, and forecast of 'showers' each day with precipitation chances ranging from 30% to 60%. It will be a quiet, soft intermittent rain not raging thunderstorms with accompanying lightening that we get in Texas. This is a part of living up here, and I'm eager to see what it's like for every day to be overcast, cloudy and with rain a real possibility. I'm wondering what adjustments that the residents make to accomodate the weather. It will be fascinating to watch for those accomodations. I'm hoping the rainy climate is going to make me appreciative of the Arizona climate we'll be rolling into in December.

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