North Cascades Nat'l Park

It is amazing that Highway 20, which cuts through North Cascades National Park, was just built in 1972. But the place still feels wild and a lot of it remains inaccessible. Many of the hikes are longer, backpacking hikes. But you can always do a section out and back. Beautiful views, though. Here's Diablo Lake as seen from an overlook. Our first drive to the overlook was sunny, and then the next morning we passed by again for a completely different scene with these low-lying clouds moving over the water.
We went crazy on our hike here and went "double-digits". Ha! Normally our hikes are around 8-9 miles. This one was about 11 or so (depending on the map you read). We also made it a one-way hike so we could do the whole trail. We left our car at the trailhead, hiked the trail back to the campground, and then picked up our car the next morning by driving the RV to the trailhead. We were leaving the park that morning anyhow, so it wasn't like we had to pack up the house just to get the car. We did toy with the idea of using our road bikes to pick up the car, but here's that word "lazy" again!
The trail was called Panther Creek - which took us through a wonderful old forest. For a long time we followed Panther Creek, crossing over it with some downed-tree-bridges. The area got hit hard last year with a storm and flooding. The park has cleaned up a lot of the trails, but the damage was still evident with blow-downs. I kept trying to come up with a word to describe this hike. And, "dense" was the word that kept coming to mind. The ground was blanketed with a moss carpeting, the canopy overhead blocked out the sky, and periodically we would have to slog through an avalanche zone that was dense with broad-leafed plants that enveloped even my head.
The only "great views" we had were at The Fourth of July Pass...we could see Neve Glacier and Colonial Glacier. But even there, the trees were so thick you had to search for an opening to see.I wanted to share some of my mushroom photos. These were taken on this hike and only represent a very, very small sampling of the variety we saw. Not only was it fun to have a treasure hunt to find as many as possible, but also to see the different stages of "eruption". A mushroom pushes out of the ground like a slow-motion eruption pushing up mulch, dirt and moss and then unfolding like a flower.