Anyway, today's plan originally had us driving from Glacier National Park to North Cascades National Park, but as I had posted last night, the weather changed our plans a little and we ended up splitting the drive over two days ... I'm glad we did!!! It turned out to be a long drive on mostly back roads in the middle of nowhere, with lots of turns. The roads were all 70 mph, but it was still grueling.
The weather overnight in Spokane was great, and we woke up to dry conditions. We took our time packing up and then went to a supermarket to pick up some ice for the cooler, then we took the little detour to get my glasses fixed. We finally got on the road to head out to North Cascades National Park at about 10:30.
On the way, we discovered that we were passing right by Grand Coulee Dam, so we decided to take a little detour to go and see the dam. I don't know about anyone else, but I have to say, I think dams are pretty cool! Fortunately, Josh likes them too, so there was no argument about going to check it out.
It really is pretty impressive. After leaving Grand Coulee Dam, we came across another dam on the Columbia River, the Chief Joseph Dam. It's not nearly as impressive as Grand Coulee Dam, but it's still pretty cool. The view down river from the dam of the Columbia River Valley was really pretty. This is also, apparently, a very big growing area for Washington State apples & cherries. The green patches across the bridge in the picture below were apple orchards. We drove through miles and miles and miles of apple and cherry orchards. It was unbelievable how massive these orchards were.
We finally reached North Cascades National Park late in the afternoon.
Like most of the national parks of the Western United States, the scenery is absolutely beautiful, and yes, that really is what the water in Diablo Lake looks like. The color was incredible.
Tomorrow, we plan to do some hiking in the park. We haven't pick out our hikes yet, but we'll take care of that tomorrow morning. Tomorrow night we're staying in the park for a second night, and then on Monday morning, we move on to Olympic National Park.
We'll be back tomorrow night with a recap of the day's activity.
P.S.: Surprisingly, we actually do have cellular access in our campground within the park. There's no cell service anywhere else here, but fortunately our campground does have it, because we're situated right next to the park headquarters.
No comments:
Post a Comment