The Cascade Mountains

Since it was a beautiful day yesterday we decided we wanted to see the mountains and maybe do some light hiking. I googled scenic highways and came up with the Cascade Scenic Highway on Route 20. The whole thing is 436 miles, we probably drove about the upper 2/3 of it, we logged over 350 miles! The first part of the mountains, going north and then east of Seattle is lush, forested, and very green. However, once we went over Rainy Pass and around Whistler Mountain the scenery changed abruptly, becoming dry, almost treeless, rocky and desert like. Plenty of pictures from our 12 hour trip.

This was the most amount of traffic we saw once we were out of Seattle. A lot of the time it seemed like we were the only car on the road.

 Buffalo Run where we ate lunch. Check out the variety of burgers.

One of the many waterfalls, or cascades, that give the mountains their name and feed the many rivers and lakes.

Another small waterfall across the road.

Diablo Lake

Diablo Lake from the overlook. The green color comes from the glacial grinding of rocks that left a very fine "rock flour" in the water.

Wildlife in the area.

We have gone over Rainy Pass and we're now starting to head  south and then west. The terrain changes dramatically.                  

 

 

That's the highway down there.

We took a picture of this outcrop of rock that we're standing on from the highway below it once we got back down to the bottom of the mountain.

Do you see the rocky outcrop just to center left? That's where we were standing to take most of the above pictures of the mountains.

The town of Winthrop

We stopped at an ice cream shop and had a two-scoop cone each for dinner. We were getting a little tired and still had at least 4 hours of driving left. We didn't stop as often on the road now.

Washington State or New Mexico?

The Columbia River