Answer the questions. Each one tells you why. Big and Little wrote them.
Park Quiz
Question 1 of 5
Diablo Lake turns bright turquoise in the summer. What makes the water that color?
Glaciers in the mountains above the lake scrape rock into powder. NPS calls that powder glacial flour. Meltwater streams carry it down into the lake, where it floats instead of sinking. The floating grains bend the sunlight, and the lake looks turquoise. The color is strongest on sunny days in July, August, and September, when the most ice is melting.
NPS counted about 16,485 visits to North Cascades National Park in 2024. But hundreds of thousands of people drove State Route 20 through these mountains that year. How can both numbers be right?
State Route 20 runs through Ross Lake National Recreation Area, not through the national park. No road crosses the park itself, only a short spur, the gravel Cascade River Road, which reaches about five miles inside to the Cascade Pass trailhead. If your car stays on the highway and your feet stay off that spur, you have seen the North Cascades without setting foot in the park. That is why the park's own visit count stays small next to the corridor traffic.
This park holds more glacier ice than anywhere else in the United States outside Alaska. About how many glaciers are up there?
NPS counts over 300 glaciers here, plus snowfields too many to count. A glacier is snow that piled up faster than it melted until it packed into ice and started sliding downhill. On the way down it grinds the rock, which is where Diablo Lake gets its color. Most of these glaciers have shrunk a lot in the last hundred years.
State Route 20 is the only highway across these mountains, and it shuts every winter. Why?
WSDOT closes the pass when the snow gets too deep to plow and the slopes above the road start sliding. Crews dig it back open in the spring. In recent years the road shut in November or early December and opened again in April or May, so the highway is a summer road, not a year-round one. Check the WSDOT page before you plan a drive.
Stehekin is a small community at the head of Lake Chelan. No road reaches it. How do you get there?
NPS says no roads connect Stehekin to the rest of Washington. You take the ferry up the lake, walk in over the mountains, or fly. The name comes from a Salishan word meaning "the way through." The valley was a passageway long before it was a town, because people crossing these mountains on foot came through here. The only way in today is still the old way in.