North Cascades

Thursday, August 11, 2011

What a great day!

We got a semi early start. From the RV park it was only a few miles into the town of Winthrop. Winthrop is an old western look town that is a pretty good tourist trap.

We stopped to take a few pictures, and then went on to the area marked for RV parking.  Plenty of picnic tables there, so we fixed our breakfast and ate outside. Wonderful start to the day.

We took our sweet time going on down the road, but were careful to let traffic go on by as we were sightseeing.  It wasn’t long before we started to climb, and then the beauty of the hills spread out and up before us.  We stopped frequently for photo ops.

After crossing the summit, the major attractions are Diablo and Ross Lakes.

We stopped at most of the viewpoints and checked out one of the campgrounds. We were on the west side now, and the clouds were hanging in around the tops of the peaks, so I’m sure we missed more stunning views. We moved on down the hill to Newhalem, where the North Cascades VC is.  Our first duty was to find a campsite. We found a very suitable site that we can share, and with our geezer cards, it is $6 a day for each rolling cave. Kind of makes up for that not so favorite RV park of last night.  Of course it does not have electric hookups, but we are getting a pretty good Verizon signal. 

After getting registered and parked in the site, we took off on a trail to the VC. The sign at the entrance had said it was one-half mile.  It was an easy trail, although we did come to an area of elevation change, but nothing too serious.  At the VC we got our parks passport books stamped, and then watched the park movie, which was excellent.

By the time we got back to camp, breakfast had long since worn off. We fixed another great meal and ate at the picnic table sheltered by our screen house.

Barney is checking out the fishing regs, and the rest of us are running down our computer batteries. We will try to get this posted before hitting the end of the battery life, then will put it on the inverter as we travel tomorrow. We will be staying put in this campground for two or three days, and just do a little sightseeing.

Good night from the rolling caves. Hope all is well with all of you.

w