Month: November 2018

Yesterday was a driving day.  I started in Winthrop, WA and followed the beautiful Methow River valley south. The surrounding mountains there had a yellow brown grass cover with just a brush of light green spread across their flanks.  When I turned east through the high ground heading toward the Grand Coulee Dam, the hills were covered with sagebrush. Many odd, almost pyramid-shaped formations, looking like stacks of clay that had been through the first firing decorated the high plain area.  Eventually, the sagebrush disappeared and black igneous rock, much of it sitting in piles where the farmers had thrown it, predominated. Near the dam and the rivers, irrigation is used to grow cherry and apple trees and there were miles of them. 

After passing down a river valley and climbing a pass among the awesome Rockies of Idaho, I crossed easterly into Montana as sunset approached. The hills nearby were like great, rumpled, light-green blankets tossed upon the earth. Far to the south, the high rocks of the mountains reflected the sunset as if they were covered with pink snow. As the road turned south, a rainstorm came in and compressed the sunset between the mountains and the clouds where it blazed as if the tops of the mountains were on fire. 

Not a bad driving day at all. 

Copyright: Dawn W Leigh. All rights reserved. 

“There is nothing so American as our national parks…The fundamental idea behind the parks…is that the country belongs to the people,” President Franklin D Roosevelt

I spent most of the day in the North Cascades National Park traveling along the lovely Highway 20 here in Washington.  The park, which is incredibly rugged, is a mecca for campers, kayakers, backcountry hikers and climbers. The road curves between huge mountains, often framed for viewing by the trees, and wanders along the glacier-green of the Skagit River and then climbs a pass to the dryer east side of the mountains’ ecosystem.  The river has a series of dams on it and supplies a huge amount of both water and power for the Seattle-Tacoma area. The park, with its widely varied ecologies, is home to a wide variety of plants and animals.  The grizzlies which once lived in this remote wilderness were killed off but the Park Service is planning over the next twenty years or so to gradually (2-3 per year) rebalance the ecology and reintroduce them from a slight overpopulation in Glacier National Park and from some areas of Canada.  For anyone living or traveling nearby, bring your gear and visit. Or, if you are like me and haven’t brought your gear this trip, take a drive.  You will enjoy it. 

Sadly, traveling through the park also makes me think about Congress declaring our parks, wildlife refuges and other public lands to have no value. The purpose of this is to divest them. Supposedly to the states. Unfortunately, few states, if any, can afford to maintain them (and, of course, states have a lot of, and varying, ways to divest property) so the end result will eventually be a sell off. So, our parks could soon be owned by the wealthy of Japan, China, Russia and Kuwait. I’ve seen a lot about NJ Governor, Chris Christie, closing some beach to the public so he could have it for his own use on July 4.  Well, once they are in private ownership, that is what can be done to our parks. Dream of visiting Denali?  Do you have enough money?  If it is open to the general public at all, it will cost more than it does now. Hope to watch the earliest sunrise in the US from the top of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park in Maine?  Good luck. Want to kayak the rivers, hike the trails, see the views – Yellowstone, Glacier, the redwoods, Everglades, Grand Canyon, Smokies, Apostle Islands, Rocky Mountain, Big Bend?  Once they are owned by private parties, what are your chances?  If you aren’t rich, I suspect they’ll be very small. 

But right now our parks, our wilderness areas, our national forests are all there being preserved for you, your children and your children’s children to enjoy. I hope we don’t lose them. If we do, we won’t ever get them back. 

“The parks do not belong to one state…The Yosemite, the Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon are national properties in which every citizen has a vested interest; they belong as much to the man of Massachusetts, of Michigan, or Florida as they do to the people of California, of Wyoming and of Arizona.” Stephen T. Mather

Let us hope that remains true.  The awe inspiring Cascades are here if you want to look.  I hope you will. 

Copyright (excluding quotes) Dawn W Leigh. All rights reserved.