Heading off on another trip, writing about my last one. Just got in two days ago from the North Cascades National Park, about two hours northeast of Seattle. I had been out there in the fall of 2005, doing a six week artist-in-residencey program for them. Went back last week to shoot some photos for the park itself in the middle of their busy season. So nice, always, to get outside – I’m an outdoorsman through and through. Could live well without cities. But the North Cascades is a truly remarkable place. True and vast wilderness, and regularly the least visited of all of the nation’s national parks. Glacial lakes and rivers, salmon and bears. Wolverines have now been seen in the park, and most recently, a small pack of wolves, down across the Canadian border along the parks’ northern boundary.
The park is spectacular. If you have never seen it – and most of you haven’t – go. You will not be disappointed if you have one spark of love in you for wild places. But the park has something else as well – a remarkable collection of people working there – people who love what they do, and whose job, day in and day out, is to protect a national treasure: the park itself. Two and half years now since returning from Africa to the US, the park offers something I haven’t found on the busy and crowded East Coast – a place where the people around you are actually happy to be where they are -where the people love their corner of the world. From what I’ve seen in the last two and half years, we don’t have that here in the East – we run from place to place. We hate our jobs, or at best tolerate them as a means to an end. And we don’t even take the time, it seems, to recognize that in ourselves.
If ten days in the North Cascade wilderness teaches you much about the world around you, it gives you, most preciously, insight into how you live – detached, in most cases, from the wilderness from which we all emerged. I truly believe we’ve cut that strand to our past to our own detriment – and the chance to reconnect slips away with each road built and each tree cut. Get out to the North Cascades if you can. Get outside at all. It’s where we’re all meant to be.
August 23rd, 2008 | by David in Travel | 1 Comment
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All Material © 2008 David Snyder
August 28th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Good to know you left a piece of your heart in the North Cascades — as it means you’ll be back again to share this place with all of us.