North Cascades National Park United States

Legendary

This rugged mountain region has the most expansive glacial system in the contiguous United States.

Photo by Jeff Hollett

This park sits about two and a half hours from Seattle and gets fewer visitors than almost any national park in the country. In 2024, only about 16,000 people came in.

Yellowstone gets that many on a slow morning.

The reason is simple: you can't drive into the park itself. One highway runs along its edge, but the park's 500,000 acres are almost all wilderness reached only on foot.

Inside are more than 300 glaciers, about a third of all the glaciers in the lower 48 states. Scientists have been measuring some of them since the 1950s, and nearly all are shrinking.

Peaks rise so sharply that people call this the American Alps. The highest, Goode Mountain, reaches 9,220 feet.

People have lived here for thousands of years. Paleo-Indian hunters were the first, following game through the valleys after the last ice age.

By the time European explorers arrived, the Skagit peoples lived on the wet western side and the Nlaka'pamux on the drier east. Both traveled the mountain passes to trade.

Fur trappers came in the early 1800s. Then in 1846, the United States and Britain agreed to draw the border with Canada along the 49th parallel, the line of latitude that now marks the park's northern edge.

Explorers followed, searching for a way to push roads and railroads through the mountains. The terrain beat them every time.

In the 1920s, Seattle built dams on the Skagit River for electricity, creating Ross Lake and the bright turquoise Diablo Lake. That's when people started fighting to save what was left.

Decades of argument ended on October 2, 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill creating the park. About 93 percent of it is now protected wilderness.

Drive Highway 20 and stop at the Diablo Lake overlook, where glacier dust turns the water an almost unreal blue-green. Hike to Cascade Pass, a 7-mile round trip with views of glaciers hanging off the peaks. Take the ferry up Lake Chelan to the tiny village of Stehekin, which has no road to the outside world.