Ferry Tales!

We packed up and headed for Port Townsend to take the ferry across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Island of Whidbey and then on to the mainland for our journey to the Northern Cascades National Park in Washington.  Here we are on the ferry just starting our journey.  Notice the “death grips” we both have on the rails?

 

 
This is the ferry we took over to Whidbey Island after we disembarked.  We got off the ferry at Coupeville, hooked the Jeep up to the RV, and then headed out to our next adventure stop.

Whidbey Island is beautiful.  Sorry no pictures folks.  We were just passing through and it’s tough to pull over to the side of the road in an RV with a toad vehicle!  The island is varied in its landscape.  From the central portion, where we started, it is very pastoral – lots of farm land with slow rolling hills and picturesque barns.  The main city we passed through, Oak Harbor, is located more near the northern end of the island. Then where we left the island (at Deception Pass) it is more like a forest with pine trees and ferns.  We basically stayed on Highway 20 all the way through Whidbey to Newhalem campground in the Cascades. 

The North Cascades National Park was established October 2, 1968.  It encompasses 684,000 acres and includes two recreation areas—Ross Lake National Recreation Area and Lake Chelan National Recreation Area (in the southeastern part of the park).  The park complex preserves virgin forests, fragile subalpine meadows, and hundreds of glaciers.  This park actually has more glaciers than any other area in the United States except for Alaska!  The North Cascades region forms part of the Cascade Range, named for its innumerable waterfalls.  The range extends from British Columbia to northern California.

I love the national park signs (most of them anyway) and the one for the Cascades is no exception.

 
Our first day out, we drove east from our campground on Highway 20.  We stopped a few places on our journey.  The first stop was at “Gorge Overlook”.  Unfortunately, you couldn’t get a good shot of the Skagit River from there (which is what I was hoping to do).  The fall was so long I had to take it in two segments.  This is the upper fall.

This is the lower fall.  Notice how it is stepped?

 

 
The Skagit River—and the local lakes—both appear emerald in summer, evidence of the park’s many glaciers.  As they move, glaciers grind bedrock into a fine “flour.” Water carrying a high concentration of glacial flour reflects the green and blue part of the light spectrum.  There are three dams on the Skagit, Ross, Diablo, and Gorge.  It is the only large river system in Washington that contains healthy populations of all five native salmon species and two species of trout.  And, if that doesn’t entice you, the river also supports one of the largest wintering Bald Eagle populations in the continental U.S.  The eagles feed on Chum and Coho salmon that have returned to the Skagit and its tributaries to spawn.  The eagles arrive in late October or early November and stay into February. The highest number of eagles is usually seen in January. Eventually we found a place to pull off the highway to get a shot of this great river.

 

The next stop on our drive was at Colonial Lake, just off the roadside.  I was able to catch some of the mountain beauty of the Cascades, which you can see have very steep inclines.  There were a number of random waterfalls cascading down the rain-slick granite faces.

You can just get a glimpse of the same emerald look of Colonial Lake (below) as in the Skagit River. If you look carefully right below the smaller middle mountain you can see a while puffy image.  This is actually a fog or mist on the surface of the lake.  The other cool thing is the reflection of both the sky and the mountains on the lake surface.  The scenery was just so beautiful and pictures do not do it justice.

 

Here's a better view of the mist/fog on the lake.

 

 

 

Off we went for our next stop which was Diablo Lake.  Again, the emerald water is just so stunning.  Isn’t this an amazing lake?  Cool little islands in the middle, too.
  

  

 

I set the camera up on a handy-dandy rock (that looked like it was put there just for that purpose) and using the auto timer took our photo at the Diablo Lake Overlook.  Yes, I could have asked someone to take our picture, but with the perfect rock in the perfect place … well, it just seemed better to let the rock do it than someone else.

 

A really “funny” (ha!ha!) event happened in the parking area at this overlook.  There were about five or six more mature (i.e., senior) Harley riders just getting ready to take off after viewing the lake.  All of a sudden one of the Harley’s alarms goes off.  So I hear the guy say, “I can’t find my keys.”  Well, his alarm (which really disturbed the peaceful atmosphere) went off about four or five times as he (and his buddies) kept looking for his keys!  Finally, they found them (don’t know where) and took off.  But I just thought that was pretty hilarious watching this “old guy” discover he’s lost his keys, the constant blaring of his annoying alarm, and his buddies trying to help him out.  Totally a senior moment, don’t you think? I felt like I should have video-taped it for them.  Maybe they wouldn’t have seen the humor in it like I did, though.

We got back into the car and headed on over to Lake Ross.  Gary took a great picture of Lake Ross (which is the biggest of the lakes, but the hardest to get a good photo of).  It’s just another beautiful emerald-colored lake along Highway 20.

 

We kept driving east but when it started to rain we decided to make a quick turn-around and head back to camp.  All in all, a beautiful, scenic drive into the Cascade Range.  We experienced unbelievable mountain scenery which the camera couldn’t catch.  Wish you were here to see it for yourself!

Psalms 104:31-32 // Let the glory of the LORD endure forever; let the LORD be glad in His works; He looks at the earth, and it trembles; He touches the mountains, and they smoke.