An Oso Beautiful Road Trip Through the North Cascades

We took a hell of a one-day road trip yesterday. The goal was to show my wife more of Washington, so it was mostly just driving and looking at scenery. We went up to Highway 20 via Darrington, seeing the new Oso Slide Memorial on the way. I thought it was very tastefully done. The flowers were gorgeous, and there’s a lot of detail you might not notice right away, like the stained glass embedded in the rusty iron monuments. It honors not only the victims, but also the thousands of people who worked or volunteered to find everybody. It brought back a lot of memories of the event.

We stopped at the North Cascades National Park Visitor Center in Newhalem. I was surprised to realize that I’d never been there before. Newhalem had become a tent camp because of all the visiting firefighters. The guy at the general store said that there’s about 50 year-round residents in the village, but a month ago there were over 100 firefighters there fighting the oddly-named Easy Fire, which had temporarily closed Highway 20. That number is now down to about 50, and we saw only minimal evidence of the actual fire on our journey. There was only a slight haze in the sky, much better than we expected.

From there we went to the Diablo Lake overlook. About 15 years ago I spent a couple of fun days canoeing there. We drove on to the Washington Pass overlook, which I had also never been to before. There we assessed our situation and decided to press on the east side of the mountains rather than turning back. We had lunch in Winthrop. After Twisp, we turned onto scenic Highway 153, which winds along the Methow River, then on to US 97, which has great views of the Columbia. We took a side trip over to Chelan via 97A, which gave us incredible views coming back down to the Columbia Valley. We briefly stopped in Wenatchee to walk around downtown for a few minutes and stretch our legs, then came home via Highway 2. We stopped in Leavenworth only to buy gas, since it was getting late and Viktoria had already been there. We noticed an interesting new roller-coaster style ride built onto a steep mountain on the west end of town.

It was a 12-hour trip with more than eight hours of driving, and I was maxed out by the time we got home. However, it was a fun weekend adventure, and we saw a hell of a lot in one day.