A look at an area just outside North Cascades National Park that some advocates think should be added to the park. They call it the "American Alps."
September 4, 2008
North Cascades National Park turns 40 this fall. Here's a look at the park today, how it came to be, and some favorite hikes and climbs.
August 14, 2008
A few tips for updating your outdoors bookshelf in 2007:
• Say farewell to the long-running "100 Hikes" guidebooks from the late, local trail-roving icons Ira Spring and Harvey Manning.
• Say hello to a new day-hiking series targeted at the prototype of the 21st-century trail explorer: time-strapped and disinclined to sleep under the stars.
• Make room for new editions of two of the best guides ever published on Washington trails.
Here's a roundup, with ratings up to five stars.
June 21, 2007
NORTH CASCADES NATIONAL PARK
For two waves of strike-it-rich dreamers — first in the 1890s, then in the late 1940s — Horseshoe Basin in the upper Stehekin River Valley ultimately proved to be a bust for hundreds of prospectors who chipped and probed and drilled its steep rock walls in search of precious metals and mineral riches.
September 22, 2006
Maybe Marvin Wayne hasn't seen it all in 30 years as medical director at Mount Baker Ski Area, but he's seen enough to know that too often urban-dwelling fun-seekers are quickly overmatched by winter conditions in the mountains.
"I see a lack of understanding in people in four important areas when they head outside for recreation," says Wayne, 60, who also serves as medical director of Emergency Medical Services for Bellingham and Whatcom County and as an emergency physician at Bellingham's St. Joseph Hospital.
November 18, 2004
Eventually, preferably before Labor Day, much of last winter's dense snowpack will melt out and, at long last, vacate the region's high-country trails.
You, faced with what will likely be the shortest high-elevation hiking season since 1999 (the summer that followed record and near-record snow accumulations at Mount Baker and Mount Rainier), are going to be on the prowl for good hikes.
So where will you go?
June 27, 2002
How well-equipped are you to face the White Death?
Bruce Tremper, author of the detailed "Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain," believed he had sufficient skills when, at age 24, he made a miscalculation that nearly cost him his life.
Tremper, then working at a Montana ski resort, describes himself as "a cocky, ex-national-circuit ski racer" who exhibited a snow-god swagger commonplace among young skiers: "In the vigor and ignorance of youth, I naturally enough considered myself to be an avalanche expert."
December 13, 2001
The most enduring impression sparked by "Cat Attacks," an engrossing, page-turning collection of human-vs.-cougar incidents in the American West since 1990, is both sobering and unsettling:
It could happen to you.
It happened to Dave and Kathy Miedema, a Colorado couple, in 1997 during a seven-mile day hike on a heavily traveled trail in Rocky Mountain National Park. Their 10-year-old son, hiking the trail no more than five minutes ahead of his parents, was attacked and killed by an 88-pound female cougar.
November 22, 2001
While reading "Volcanoes in America's National Parks" we learn:
That of America's 384 national parks and monuments, 39 center on volcanoes or have been significantly influenced by volcanic activity.
The United States experienced 35 volcanic eruptions during the 20th century 31 in Alaska, plus Kilauea and Mauna Loa in Hawaii, California's Lassen Peak and, in 1980, Washington's Mount St. Helens.
November 1, 2001
Other photography-based books devoted to Mount Rainier may take up more space on your coffee table, and their text may touch on a wider variety of topics, but for readers whose emotional connection to The Mountain runs through its rock, snow, ice, fog, forests and flowers, this collaboration between two long-haul backcountry wanderers presents an engaging Valentine to the Northwest's grandest natural spectacle.
October 18, 2001
RSS for Terry Wood
