America's Alps -- North Cascades Itinerary: Route Traces Heights Of Pleasure

As you drive the North Cascades Highway, throw a salute to the never-say-die folks such as the late Sen. Henry M. Jackson who preserved all that beauty for future generations.

It wasn't easy. The cross-state highway first was proposed in 1893, four years after Washington became a state.

It opened - 79 years later.

The 400,000-acre North Cascades National Park and Recreation area, through which the highway passes, had to survive critics who said three national parks in one state was too much. It got its official park designation in 1968.

Now you can sample the buffet of what's been called "America's Alps" - mountain peaks, lakes and streams at your leisure.

The highway typically is open for travel April to November, depending on the weather. This year it opened March 24.

First, pick a route. A start from the west gets the most uninspiring part of the drive out of the way first - from a mild sea-level climate to mountains of more than 5,000 feet then down to semi-desert country of Eastern Washington.

I took it backward - from Pateros, in Okanogan County - just as a hint of fall was turning leaves red and gold and after a light dusting of snow high in the mountains was moving mule deer to lower elevations.

From Pateros, Highway 153 winds north up the Methow Valley, along the Methow River, past orchards and horse ranches and hillsides covered with pines.

Just beyond the little waystop called Methow, a highway sign eulogizes the long-gone town of Silver, founded in 1887, as the first real town in the valley.

Washed downstream by a flood a bit later, Silver rose quickly, soon boasting a saloon, a blacksmith shop and a store with a dance hall. Pioneers gathered there for all-night hoedowns and to welcome the weekly mail from Malott. In 1900, the famous Red Shirt silver mine, on nearby Polepick Mountain, threw in the towel; four years later, so did Silver. There's virtually nothing left there.

A few miles southeast of Twisp, the highway merges with Highway 20 (from Omak and Okanogan).

Nestled between timbered hills, Twisp was the undisputed commercial center of the valley until Winthrop gussied itself up to attract tourists driving across the North Cascades. Now there's talk that Twisp is going to adopt a theme similar to Winthrop's.

Just south of Winthrop, there's a turnoff to one of the state's poshest playgrounds, Sun Mountain Lodge.

The year-round resort - high above the Methow Valley - offers swimming, tennis, river-rafting, hiking and horseback-riding much of the year and is a favorite of cross-country skiers in the winter. Besides the main lodge of rustic pine there are cabins on nearby Patterson Lake.

Winthrop is a lot more fun than most tourist traps. You'll like its boardwalks, frontier atmosphere and friendly merchants.

Guy Waring, a Harvard-educated teetotaler built a general store and founded the town in 1891, naming it after Theodore Winthrop, a young Yale graduate who had toured the Northwest in 1853 and had written glowing accounts of its history and geography.

To keep out the worst drinking establishments, Waring opened the Duck Brand Saloon, ordering his bartenders to give the boot to anyone showing the slightest sign of inebriation.

Modern-day tourists are more likely to swagger in off the boardwalk and order a double-tall vanilla latte.

Be sure your gas tank's at least half full when you leave town. There's a 80-90 mile mountain drive ahead and no place to refuel.

From Winthrop, Highway 20 West follows the Methow River to Mazama and on to Early Winters settlement, where once developers envisioned a large downhill ski resort. After heated court battles with environmental and local groups who said it would damage the pristine beauty of the upper Methow Valley, that project was abandoned. But plans for a much smaller resort - likely without downhill skiing - are in the wings. Right now, the site consists of a few cabins, bubbling Early Winters Creek, and pines and hemlocks on the hillsides.

The North Cascades Wilderness Area begins at the Early Winters National Forest Service campground. For the next 70 miles - about half through the national park - you can say goodbye to the commercial blight that mars so many of our finest landscapes.

Creeks bound over rocks along the roadside. Squirrels scamper among alpine firs that scent the air with a fragrance that can't be captured in a bottle.

Each twist and turn of the highway provides fresh snapshots. Of craggy mountain peaks. Of snowbanks on steep, rocky slopes. Of canyons carved wide and deep by water and ice. Of hillsides tinted in greens, reds and yellows.

There are two major passes on the North Cross-State Highway: Rainy, 4,885 feet, and Washington, whose 5,477 feet elevation is exceeded in this state only by 5,575-feet-high Sherman Pass in the Colville National Forest. Both Rainy and Washington are snow-covered a good part of the year. Near the Rainy Pass summit the highway cuts across the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs from Canada to Mexico and is a favorite of serious backpackers.

Take a break at the Washington Pass Overlook to feast eyes and camera on deeply fissured Liberty Bell Mountain, on cars that look like toys as they travel a highway clawed from the side of a vast canyon.

Overlooks are also good places to meet people like Tom Belew, of Coupeville, on Whidbey Island. He's an ex-Californian who had fallen in love with Washington's wide-open country and with a Washington woman. They were on their honeymoon.

If you've never seen the Pacific Crest Trail, there's a wonderful opportunity near the summit of Rainy Pass. I watched Marj Hoye and Greg Lyons of Bend, Ore., adjust their backpacks and study the trail signs (Canadian border, 62 miles; Harts Pass, 30 miles).

Back on the highway, a young man in hiking shorts, eyes shaded by a large hat, lounged against his backpack. He extended his thumb and a smile. Sure, I'm wary of hitchhikers. But this was the North Cascades, where waving at a highway survey crew or commenting on the scenery to strangers is as natural as breathing.

Throwing his 50-pound pack into the back of my open pickup, Brad said he wanted a lift to the Easy Pass Trailhead, where he'd left his car three days earlier and taken off on a solo hike. Formerly of Bellevue, now living in Spokane, he'd experienced varied conditions on his hike - snowfields, lightning storms and heat that soaked his clothing and sapped his strength.

Why do something so arduous, and alone?

"Every few months, I need my nature fix; so I come over here."

It made sense. When we parted a short time later, I turned up Respighi's "Pines of Rome" on the tape deck. I needed my fix, too.

More mountain peaks. Denser stands of trees. Then, suddenly, around a bend was Ross Lake, one of three lakes created by Seattle City Light's Skagit River dams.

Ross Lake is bluer than any pair of eyes you've ever gazed into. No eye liner and no eyelash lengthener needed here. Just that incredible blue, while all around the North Cascades serve up another generous helping of mountains.

And that was just an appetizer. A few miles west is the Diablo Lake viewpoint. You could say Diablo lake is green, but that would be like saying that Beethoven just wrote music. Imagine the most brilliantly hued jade and emeralds you've ever seen in a slick-paper jewelry ad.

When you can take your eyes off the lake, watch the rabbit-like pika scamper among the rocks. Read the plaque that explains how the North Cascades "may" have been born in the South Pacific about 500 million years ago. Pushed up by the Earth's crust, a great blob of material may have drifted Northeast where - a mere 40 million years ago - and crashed into the North American continent and folded up into mountains.

Among the Diablo Lake-area peaks that may trace their ancestry to the South Pacific are Jack, Crater and Ruby Mountains, Colonial, Snowfield, Pyramid and Davis Peaks, and quaintly named Paul Bunyan's Stump.

From the Diablo viewpoint, the road winds down to Colonial Creek Campground, for a closer look at the lake,, and then on to Diablo - where Seattle City Light's popular Skagit Tours begin.

The museum traces the evolution of electric lighting over the past 75 years and pays tribute to J.D. Ross, father of Seattle City Light. Ross' belief in public ownership of utilities enabled Seattle to be on the cutting edge of hydroelectric-power generation.

You're on the home stretch. Continue on to nearby Newhalem, where many City Light employees live, and let the kids - or be one yourself - climb into the cab of "Old Number Six," a restored Baldwin steam engine. Go ahead and ring the brass bell, Casey.

It's an easy drive these days to Marblemount and Rockport. But, until City Light built a 31-mile-long railroad from Rockport to Diablo in 1919, the only way to get into the area was by foot or horseback. A road finally was pushed through in 1950; the railroad was abandoned when the Gorge Dam was built four years later.

Between Newhalem and Marblemount, the National Park ends and the real world, sadly, begins. You'll know by the litter and rusted car bodies.

After fueling stomach and vehicle at Marblemount, you have a decision: go straight ahead on Highway 20 at Rockport and eventually tie in with Interstate 5, or go left on Highway 530 through Darrington to I-5.

Even though I like to quote Yogi Berra's famous directions to his house - "When you come to a fork in the road, take it" - I will make a suggestion: try the less-traveled Darrington route.

At Darrington, home to loggers and bluegrass musicians, you pass a working sawmill with enough logs to keep the world in match sticks for a millennium or two, and a cedar-shake mill that just may produce the sweetest smell this side of a hamburger smothered in onions.

About eight miles west of Darrington is a sign, Old Fortson Mill Road. I take road.

It's not much of a road these days. After crossing the railroad tracks, it continues about 200 yards before dead-ending in a scraggly stand of alders.

I close my eyes and try to remember the little sawmill town of Fortson, which once flourished in the shadow of Whitehorse Mountain.

There's nothing here to recall the Klement & Kennedy company store, outhouses with crescents on the door and Sears Roebuck on the floor, water pumps on back porches, the loggers' bunkhouse and cookhouse, the big pile of sawdust that scented the air for miles around.

Not even a board remains of the post office my grandmother operated out of her home, and where I was born back when Cal Coolidge occupied the White House.

I gun the motor and get out of there.

By all means, drive the North Cross-State Highway. Build some memories of your own.