North Cascades National Park | Monkeys in the mountains?!

Summary

A short written summary of the episode — not the full transcript. Press play above for the whole thing.

At Newhalem the high-voltage lines run straight over your head, and if you stand still underneath them your teeth buzz. That is Seattle turning its lights on, 120 miles away.

Three dams sit on this stretch of the Skagit. Seattle City Light got its federal permit in 1917 and has been damming this river ever since. The three of them still carry about a fifth of City Light’s power. When the park was created in 1968, nobody took them out. Congress drew the line around the peaks and the glaciers and left the river corridor (dams, highway, company town) as a national recreation area. So you can stand at a sign that reads North Cascades National Park and not be standing in it.

The man who built the dams was J.D. Ross, and he needed Seattle voters to keep paying for them. So he lit Ladder Creek Falls with colored floodlights, ran a private train out for dinners, and planted tropical gardens that had to be dug up and carried into heated greenhouses every winter. A ranger told us he also put monkeys on an island in one of the reservoirs, and that they were brought indoors at night because they were cold. Nobody could tell us how that ended.

Ross Dam is 540 feet, taller than the observation deck on the Space Needle. Nobody has ever built a fish ladder that tall, so the plan is trucks: trap the fish, drive them past the dams, let them out on the other side. Nothing is built yet. Little named it the fish bus and the name stuck.

The goats at Washington Pass follow hikers for the salt in sweat and backpack straps. About 325 of them were airlifted out of the Olympics in slings under helicopters and set down in these mountains, where they belong. Washington Pass is not in the park either. It is national forest.

By the end of the day Big had a rule. You do not add things for fun, and if we broke it, we fix it, even when the fix is silly. Then Erika asked him about Diablo Lake. It is glacial flour and the best thing we saw all day, and it exists only because somebody built a wall across a river.

Little still wants the monkeys.