![]() ![]() I’ve backpacked, climbed, and dayhiked in mountains with many more grizzlies than the North Cascades, from Glacier National Park to the Canadian Rockies and Alaska. Todd Arndt backpacking the Fisher Creek Trail, North Cascades National Park. Click here to learn how I can help you plan your next trip. Click here for my e-guides to classic backpacking trips. Join The Big Outside to get full access to all of my blog’s stories. Click here to sign up for my FREE email newsletter. Hi, I’m Michael Lanza, creator of The Big Outside. ![]() While we’ll spend most of our time within the national park-nearly all of which is designated as the Stephen Mather Wilderness, more than 600,000 acres named in honor of the first director of the National Park Service-we’ll also spend parts of two days in the Lake Chelan National Recreation Area, one of the three units of the North Cascades National Park Complex and part of the Stephen Mather Wilderness. It will take us from deep in one of America’s most primeval and ancient forests to sub-alpine views of the most heavily glaciated peaks in the Lower 48. Our 80-mile route will cross four mountain passes, traversing from the rainforest west of the Cascade Crest-where up to 120 inches of precipitation falls annually-to the park’s drier and sunnier east side. It’s our first afternoon of a five-day backpacking trip in one of the most uncrowded, rugged, and wild national parks in the contiguous United States-and a personal favorite of mine, for all of those reasons: North Cascades. Todd Arndt, Fisher Creek Trail, North Cascades N.P. West, the word “grizzly” in a place name serves as a melancholy tombstone for a degree of wildness lost long ago.īut in the North Cascades, that name delivers an ice-water-in-the-face reminder that North America’s apex predator still stalks these mountains. That ranger, of course, meant black bears when she warned me about the healthy bruin population at Grizzly Creek. The campsite where we’ll sleep two nights hence only sits about five straight-line miles from where we stand. ![]() Grizzly Creek itself begins its downhill journey on the other side of the 7,000-foot ridge forming the southern edge of Fisher Creek Basin-the fortress of cliffs and pinnacles we’re gazing up at in awe now. Without taking his eyes off that tangle of alder and tall brush, Todd just says, “Yup.”Īlthough Grizzly Creek, our third night’s campsite, lies more than 30 trail miles and two hiking days from here, it’s much closer than the circuitous trail route to it suggests. “That’s where they’ll be,” I say to Todd. We’re hiking downhill past ripe huckleberry bushes toward a thicket of slide alder and chest-high brush that the trail passes through-ideal bear habitat. Battleship-gray skies threaten a common meteorological occurrence in these mountains-rain-although we’ve seen only sprinkles and wind so far. Fog swirls around the jagged peaks nearly a vertical mile above us. Those words that a backcountry ranger spoke to me over the phone just yesterday echo through our heads now, as my friend Todd Arndt and I descend switchbacks from misleadingly named, 6,500-foot Easy Pass into the densely forested valley of Fisher Creek in Washington’s North Cascades National Park. ![]()
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