Beautiful and Dangerous

Editor’s note: We are running a series this spring/summer called “GREAT ROADS”, our favorite motorcycle rides around the country. Ted’s is part 2. For our first installment, click HERE.

It is a land where nothing comes easy.  Her beauty is all around, up above and everywhere for the taking, but she will fight you every inch of the way, throwing everything she can at you, from active volcanoes and massive avalanches to rugged bedrock and hungry animals with flesh ripping claws.  And those animals know you are a slow runner.  If you want to mine her treasures you need determination, grit and a sprinkling of stupidity.

This is the Pacific Northwest, and this is my home.

Caught halfway between rugged Alaska and diverse Colorado, Washington State is a blend of each, mixing all of the ruggedness and high peaks of Alaska combined with the cowboy spirit and terrain variety of Colorado.  You could exist in the state’s vast boring eastern plains if you wanted to, living a peaceful flat life, never exploring the rugged heart of the state.

But no one here does that.  The land won’t let you.  It calls to you like a siren, begging you to explore just because it is beautiful, and it is there.  Explorer spirit is how the population got here many moons ago, and that spirit has never left.  It is why we here in the upper left build giant planes, invent grunge music played by left handed guitarists and climb mountains for the sole purpose of skiing down. Unless there is a helicopter nearby, in which case we definitely use those things, because getting literally thrown out of a helicopter on the top of a mountain with nothing but a pair of skis and your wits is just about as good as life gets.  Ask me how I know.

Liberty Bell looms in the background as workers use spring sunshine to clear the road. Yes, there is a road somewhere under all those feet of snow. Photo by WSDOT. 

And we build roads up here where no sane person would build them.  For some reason, in a spirit that can only be explained by understanding that they live in the Pacific Northwest, someone looked at the most remote, rugged, inhospitable and breathtaking region and decided to pave a road through it.  Maybe they did it for the challenge.  Maybe they did it out of Northwest explorer spirit.  Or maybe, just maybe, they had the foresight to know that they were creating one of the most beautiful roads in the world.

Like all things in the Northwest, it was a fight.

The Pacific Northwest does not give up her treasures easily and so it was with building North Cascades Highway 20.  Funding for the road started when Washington State set aside funds for a survey team to scout a pass over the northern part of the Cascade Mountain Range in 1895 and just a brief time later, on September 2nd, 1972 the road was open.  A road over seventy years in the making, everything in the Northwest is a fight.

The Liberty Bell turn during construction shows the skill and determination it took to carve a road into a mountain. Photo by WSDOT.

Nature’s ruggedness fought construction the entire way.  Winter storms, avalanches and deadly dropping icicle daggers would stop construction during the winter months while during the summer, rockslides, rattlesnakes and wasp infestations kept workers frisky.  In places where surveyors had no choice but to put the road through solid rock, the bedrock wore out 3.5 inch wide drill bits every 50 feet and cages were built on heavy equipment to protect their pilots from rockslides.  Only two men died while building the road.  Just two. 

But my Lord what a road.

North Cascades Pass Highway 20 opens in early May if we are lucky, when the snowplow coming from the east meets the snowplow coming from the west.  For a few brief months during the summer the gates to heaven open.  It is seventy miles between dots of civilization so if something goes wrong, you are on your own.  This is the Pacific Northwest, remember.

Avalanches threaten work crews as they battle the elements to clear the road. Full clearance usually happens by early May. Photo by WSDOT.

It starts for real at Mazama, where legend Donni Reddington’s former house lies.  In typical Northwest fashion it has a garage built only for motorcycles, tires and logs buried in the front yard for ADV bike trials, a chair from a ski lift in the backyard and a climbing wall on the inside.

Yes, this is how people live up here.

From Mazama the road hugs the right side of the glacier scoured valley until the turn at Liberty Bell.  Sharp dark peaks poke skyward out of the snow like angry black fingers while the road winds underneath like a child sneaking out of the house at night.  Lean hard right, keep your revs high and let your exhaust echo off the cliff face.  If you don’t get goosebumps here, you are probably dead.

It’s not heaven, but the elevation makes it close.

After the the 5477 ft summit at Washington Pass, pavement snuggles in the valley between mountains too numerous to name.  They are everywhere,  I have heli-skied these mountains and after many hot laps being thrown out of a helicopter with my skis I gained a new appreciation for those who came here not by helicopter but by horse, iron will and determination.

Recipe for success on North Cascades Pass: bring something fast, bring something loud, bring something red, bring some friends.

Asphalt is buttery smooth since it sees no winter traffic and is used only five months a year.  I am convinced that the construction crews who built North Cascades Pass had experience laying racetrack quality asphalt.  It has grip.  Wild terrain gave surveyors no other choice but to make the road 70 miles of endless cliff hugging curves which only encourages hooligan full throttle passes of plodding sedans.  Or maybe that’s just me.  And everyone in the Wild Rose Squad pictured above.  Don’t ask me what the speed limit is.  I’ve never looked.  And I really don’t care.

Diablo Lake is fiendishly green and a constant companion to the road.

Then suddenly a green alpine lake appears out of nowhere.  Not blue, not aqua, luminescent green.  It is shocking.  Minerals from the rocky landscape and glacier runoff give the water it’s poison neon color and it’s name is appropriate, Diablo Lake.  Then in typical hard-ass northwest fashion someone decided to dam it.  Diablo Dam is carved into solid rock looking like the bedrock suddenly sprouted a castle fortress from buried seed.  You can ride your motorcycle across the top of the dam and if you time it right you can see the dam spill water over the bedrock cliffs in a roar that would shame Niagara Falls.

The back and front of Diablo Dam show the sheer drop that water must take when spilled over the bedrock. It is a roaring drop over bedrock cliffs.

Eventually, after 70 miles of bliss, North Cascades Pass Highway 20 dumps into civilization turning into any other bland road.  It is right then that you realize this road has ruined you.  From now on you expect every highway to be like that, and every day should be like that, and every road should have 70 mile stretches free from the stinking urban vomit of off-ramps and quickie marts, and every road should lie at the feet of great mountains, every stretch of asphalt should have racetrack grip, every road should be open only five months of the year just to make it that damn special and every roadside shoulder should be filled with snow.  In July.

This is not the Swiss Alps or the Italian Dolomites. This is Washington State’s North Cascades Pass.

It is then that you realize all of these thoughts point to one fact- you have just ridden one of the greatest roads in the world.

Ted Edwards

*Photos by Ted and the WSDOT.