In the final year of the long effort to establish a North Cascades National Park, it must have seemed like an “impossible dream!” NCCC’s leadership put together a slide show and wrote a script to promote the idea of a National Park and barnstormed all the meetings they could attend.
Imagine, the North Cacades Highway was still not completed, and the blasting could be heard echoing through the Skagit and Early Winters Creek valleys from where the road ended then, in Diablo and Mazama. It was clear to our founders that if they didn’t protect the remaining untrammeled wilderness there, spur roads would be built and the approach valleys would be logged…
As it was, the Park proposal involved its own set of compromises, as you can see from the maps in this slideshow. But by October, 1968, it became reality! Relive those heady days when Henry Jackson promised he would “lead in the parade” and LBJ signed the North Cascades Act.