North Cascades: The Park Logging Could Not Stop

North Cascades National Park was established in nineteen sixty-eight after one of the bitterest wilderness fights in Pacific Northwest history. The opposition was well-funded: timber companies, mining interests, and Seattle City Light, which wanted to build dams on the upper Skagit River. Conservation organizations had been pushing for protection of the upper Skagit basin since the nineteen thirties. It took more than thirty years for the park to become law.

What the fight rarely discussed was the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe and related Skagit communities, whose treaty territory encompassed the upper Skagit basin. The Skagit River had been the center of the Skagit people's salmon economy for thousands of years. Seattle City Light had already altered the upper river with dams built in the nineteen twenties. The park's designation, like so many wilderness designations before it, treated the landscape as unoccupied and unmanaged when it was in fact neither.

The park preserves the largest concentration of glaciers in the contiguous United States outside Alaska: more than three hundred glaciers covering more than forty square miles of ice. More than half of those glaciers have shrunk significantly since nineteen fifty. At current rates of warming, scientists project that the majority of North Cascades glaciers could disappear within this century.

The mountains here are among the most rugged in the contiguous forty-eight states. Peaks exceed nine thousand feet. Valleys drop below one thousand feet. The vertical relief within the park spans more than eight thousand feet in some drainages. It is a landscape that defeated the loggers and the miners and the dam builders, not because it was protected early, but because it was almost too difficult to reach. The effort to protect it came just in time to stop what the terrain alone could not.