Day 25 – Turnaround Day

Diablo Lake (above the Diablo Dam)

After 24 days on the road, we have finally turned around and are now headed back for home. We left Vancouver and drove to the North Cascades National Park. One big complaint about the trip: it took 45 minutes to get through the border crossing into the US!

Each one of the new parks we visit has a different surprise for us. North Cascades is kind of out of the way and doesn’t get as many visitors as some of the other parks but it is quite beautiful in its own way. There is only one main road, Hwy 20, through the park and it takes you through a valley surrounded by mountains on both sides, frequent waterfalls and occasional glaciers. The park isn’t quite as unspoiled as some others. There were a series of dams and power plants built on the Skagit River in the 20's and 30's to provide power to Seattle, but they aren’t all that obtrusive and the lakes created by the dams are spectacular.

Ladder Creek Falls

We stopped at the park visitor center to watch the obligatory film and learned that the park has more glaciers than any other park in the lower 48 states. We went further down the road, stopped for a short hike up to Ladder Creek Falls and then cruised through the rest of the park in a couple of hours before reaching central Washington. As soon as we left the Cascade Mountains, we came back into the high desert region again, but with the one difference. We started seeing fruit orchards. They weren’t everywhere but we spotted apples and pears, but also passed some trees which had already been picked, maybe peaches. It was kind of surprising to see orchards in such an arid climate, but they were using irrigation. We also drove through about 30 miles of countryside damaged by the recent fires here before we reached our hotel in Omak, WA.