Early Start, Beautiful Day, Frustrating Finish
We got a very early start from the Abbotsford Cabela's parking lot. It was a rather restless night as the parking lot was extremely brightly lighted. We stopped at the Starbucks across the parking lot for an early breakfast. It opened at 4:30am. We got there before 6 o'clock. From there it was off to the border and into Sumas, WA. The border crossing was uneventful even though there was already a bit of a backup at 6:30.
A quick stop for fuel in Sumas was needed. We waited until we crossed into the US as the fuel prices were much less than in Canada, but still $2.75 a gallon for diesel. It was higher than expected. The effects of Hurricane Harvey are already being felt, even across the country in this most northwestern corner. Along with a fill-up at this station came a free gift. It was even something useful...a half-dozen fresh eggs.
Our chosen route took us south on WA 9 rather than the interstate highway, I-5. We rolled along at a comfortable pace along the two lane road through farm country and forests, following an empty dual trailer grain truck all the way to WA 20 in the interestingly named town of Sedro-Wooley. From there the road went east to the park, but we went west to Burlington for a provisioning stop at the Fred Meyers supermarket there.
As we arrived, we saw that this store also had a Fred Meyers gas station. We still had over 600 loyalty points from our shopping in Alaska and ended up with over 800 when we finished shopping. We could have easily gone the additional 50 miles from the border to here and saved 80 cents per gallon! The really sad part is that the Alaska points were all in July and expire tomorrow, so we can't take advantage of them on our way back through town as we head to Olympic National Park next week.
From Burlington, it was on to North Cascades NP. After a short stop at the park visitor center in Sedro-Wooley, we were back on WA 20 eastbound. The day had become partly cloudy with clear blue skies as we wound our way up into the park. These were the clear skies we'd seen in quite a while. After days in the gray dampness of Northwestern British Columbia, followed by the forest fire smoke as we came south, the clear skies were very welcome. The drive up to the park was a narrow winding road, a perfect motorcycle road and we saw many going in both directions...including a few that passed us in rather dicey conditions.
With our usual perfect timing, we were arriving at a popular park near a major metropolitan area at the beginning of Labor Day weekend...with no reservations. There are three campgrounds available to us, two of which are mostly reserveable and the reserved sections were all fully booked for the weekend. We had to go searching. The thought was to look at each one to see who had sites available and find two sites together. This was no easy task.
The first campground we came to was the smallest, Goodell Creek. Harry and Sally had stayed there on a previous trip to the Northwest, but that was in the days before solar panels. The available sites were few and all were in deep woods and small. We moved on.
The next stop was Newhalem Creek, the main campground right near the visitor center. Only one loop was non-reserveable. We drove through it and found that there were still a fair selection of sites, and they were more open than at Goodell Creek. Many of the available sites were in the back of the loop in an area that was at the edge of a wildfire a couple of years ago. These sites were very sunny, but that is because they were surrounded by dead trees, both standing and on the ground.
We decided to check out the last campground at Colonial Creek at the edge of Diablo Lake. It was ten miles further up the road, but was on a lake and had several interesting trails nearby. After a trip up more steep winding road, along with an unplanned detour into the tent-only Gorge Lake campground...I managed to ignore the GPS and confuse Gorge Lake with Colonial Creek and went down a narrow road and over a single lane bridge before realizing my error...we finally made it to Colonial Creek. We turned into a campground with mostly reserved sites that were small and far from flat. We looped around, found nothing and headed back down the steep main road.
About a half mile downhill it dawned on me that we didn't see the first-come, first-serve part of the campground, so, with much gnashing of teeth, we pulled off the road, laboriously turned around and went back up the hill. There was another section of the campground on the other side of the road from where we went in, but it was unsigned. This was the unreserved area. It had some pretty nice sites, unfortunately they were all taken. In fact, all the sites were already occupied. Time to go back downhill to Newhalem Creek.
The challenge was to find two sites that were nearby and had some light. After three times around the loop, we finally decided to pull into one of the more shaded sites with available ones on both sides. We assumed that Harry and Sally were right behind, but they were not. They had decided to pull into a site near the burned area because they were tired of looking and were hungry. We abandoned our site and went around again, but there was nothing available near them that wasn't burned out an very unappealing. We went back to our original choice, site 80, which was actually more open than we first thought and was flat.
It has a fair amount of shade among tall pines, but this will be a good thing this weekend as the temperatures are expected to get into the 90s. We settled in,had lunch, put out the Kermit chairs and felt relieved to finally stop.
By dinner time, all of the sites around us had filled in. It looks like the campground is already full and it is only Thursday night.
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