into the Cascades

We’ve long believed that the best way to recharge our depleted batteries was to turn off our devices and spend some quality time in nature. Arriving on the West Coast for our ten-day, kid-free getaway, we were glad to catch up with old friends but we didn’t linger in the city. After spending a night in Seattle, we loaded up the car and headed to the Cascade Mountains.

Despite living in Seattle for a year before grad school, S had never been to the Cascades. D has never lived on the West Coast at all, so this was all new to him as well. We briefly scrolled through hike recommendations on AllTrails, which is how we decided to spend the bulk of this trip in the Cascades instead of Olympic National Park, but that was the extent of our pre-trip research. Our last couple of months in Costa Rica were so all-consuming and the move so stressful that we put very little thought into planning our home leave. In fact, four days into our West Coast swing, we still don’t have lodging figured out for the final night of this brief trip.

We were up in the middle of the night to make our 7 a.m. flight from San Jose to the States. Arriving at D’s parents’ house bleary-eyed after traveling all day, we were in a near zombie state by the time we had gotten the kids to bed and finished repacking our bags some time after midnight. We landed in the States in the middle of a heat wave that was so bad we had been forced to leave our dog behind in Costa Rica. Absentmindedly shoving swimming suits and flip-flops into our bags, it occurred to us that we might want to double-check the weather — and a good thing we did, too! The heat wave spared the Pacific Northwest. Highs in the North Cascades hovered around 50 degrees; lows were predicted to dip below freezing temperature. We were not ready. S borrowed warm gear from our Seattle friends before we drove into the mountains.

Initially, when we thought we might be able to visit both major national parks on this trip, we had contemplated driving straight from Seattle into the North Cascades. Our local friends counseled us against this plan, which would’ve involved entirely too much driving. It would have enabled us to check a couple of boxes in our bid to visit all of the country’s national parks, but we would’ve only shortchanged ourselves on both visits. Instead, we decided to spend more time in the mountains and make a full loop through the Cascades region, which in addition to great hiking also boasts several cute towns.

After driving over Stevens Pass and catching our first glimpse of snow on the lower Cascade Mountains, we stopped in Leavenworth. A turn-of-the-twentieth-century logging town, Leavenworth faced major decline by the 1950s, as lumber mills closed and the regional office of the Great Northern Railroad, which had birthed the town, relocated. A pair of enterprising businessmen decided to rebrand Leavenworth in a bid to stem this decline, transforming the struggling town into a Bavarian-style village that today does brisk business with skiers and summer tourists alike. We stopped for some delicious German fare: brats, soft pretzels, and brewskis. Leavenworth is distinctive enough that a photo from its Munchen Haus, which we included in our last post, was enough for keen-eyed friends to pinpoint our location.

After a brief stop in Leavenworth, we headed to Winthrop, which also leans hard into a town theme. Winthrop was only incorporated one century ago, but it is home to the oldest legal saloon in Washington State and maintains purposefully time-weathered building facades all along its main street that evoke the Wild West days. It is small, cute, and not as overrun with visitors as Leavenworth had been, rendering it a perfect home base from which to launch our exploration of the Cascades.