Serious Zen

On a recent trip to Seattle for a conference, I managed to sneak away for an afternoon to check out North Cascades National Park. From Seattle, access to the park entails a relatively short drive north on I-5 and then another short jaunt east on scenic North Cascades Highway (SR 20). The highway runs along the Skagit River—a river Jack Kerouac called his “pure little favorite river of the Northwest”—and officially enters the park about 20 miles east of Marblemount, site of the North Cascades National Park Wilderness Information Center. Although my time was extremely limited, I did manage to snap several photos of the river along the way, as well as a few more on a short, non-technical, extremely recreational “hike” on a trail called Thunder Knob near Colonial Creek in the Ross Lake National Recreation Area.

For ease of viewing, I added a gallery, entitled “Washington,” to the collection of photos on the Serious Zen site. You can access them here.

Needless to say, I’ll be headed back to this place very, very soon. In addition to being beautiful, contemplative, and decidedly wild, the North Cascades were also the stomping grounds of poet Gary Snyder, and so I’m determined to return for some serious backcountry hiking.

Here’s a short, North Cascades-inspired poem from Snyder entitled “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout” (Sourdough Mountain, by the way, is located north of Diablo Lake and is most directly accessed via a trail that is described as “one of the most strenuous in the park.”):

Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.