We spent a solid week at North Cascades at the Newhalem Creek Campground. North Cascades is one of the least visited national parks and is known as the American Alps because of the sweeping Mountain views all along state highway 20.

Before coming to North Cascades, I had read that it was located in a hydroelectric project, but I hadn’t realized just what that meant. There are numerous dams on the rivers and lakes and electric lines running alongside the roads. The area was developed by Seattle City Lights to power the city. The actual national park boundaries include only the very remote areas of the park and the areas alongside the highway and the trails near the rivers and lakes are actually national recreation areas instead of part of the national park. So I suppose that technically we never actually visited the National Park!

We enjoyed the amazing views and the stunning turquoise waters of the lakes and Skagit River (pronounced “Skadgit” with a soft g sound). The best trail was Thunder Knob trail which rose from Diablo Lake to a height of 1867 feet. And a great part of these trails was that dogs were allowed.

I didn’t enjoy boondocking at our campsite, especially when we found out our 2 generators weren’t able to run the air conditioning and the first 2 days we were there the temps hovered around 90. Thankfully it cooled off after that and our boondocking inconvenience was just rationing water and having the refrigerator not work very well. I think we have some things to figure out before we get good at boondocking.