The North Cascades ecosystem includes diverse forests shaped by natural processes and human history. Indigenous peoples have used the forests for millennia, employing cultural fire and harvesting various resources to live a rich life. Non-Native settlers who arrived in the mid-nineteenth century saw the forests mostly in economic terms, and the subsequent rise of the timber economy, facilitated by railroads and skyrocketing demand for wood products, transformed North Cascades forests. But the exploitation of labor and the land forced reform as workers and conservationists organized. Federal land management sought to protect forests, develop them for recreation, and help the timber industry. By the 1950s, these competing demands clashed. This struggle culminated in efforts to preserve much of the North Cascades as a national park in 1968.
Vast Wilderness
The North Cascade ecosystem is vast, some 28,000 square miles. It stretches from Snoqualmie Pass in the south to British Columbia in the north and across the Cascades nearly from Puget Sound in the west to the Okanogan and Columbia rivers in the east. Forests and mountains dominate the region. Today [2025], the majority of this land is held in some sort of conservation status, such as a national park, national forest, or state forest. The communities within the North Cascades are relatively small, with larger population centers Bellingham, Everett, and Wenatchee sitting just outside the region. Because of this comparative remoteness, the forests of the North Cascades appear to be primarily shaped by nature and not human activities. However, this masks a rich human history in these forests.
Marine air moves east off the Pacific Ocean and dumps precipitation along the western Cascade Mountains, providing excellent conditions for great dense forests. Western Washington forests are often referred to as Douglas fir forests after the species that became dominant in commercial markets. However, tree species are more diverse than that. Along with Douglas fir, western hemlock and western red cedar cloak low foothills and mountains, giving way to Pacific silver fir around 4,000 feet and then to the smaller mountain hemlock and Alaska cedars found higher before rocks and glaciers cap the range. On the eastern slopes, only about a quarter of the precipitation falls. Forests are consequently less dense. They include different species, dominated by ponderosa pines.
Indigenous Uses
Indigenous peoples lived in, used seasonally, and traveled through North Cascades forests. Trails and community sites were used for thousands of years and continue to be. The areas where the forest canopy opened were especially valuable for groups such as the Upper Skagit, who might burn these areas to maintain their productivity and make them suitable for cultivating native species. Fire also helped reduce competition to Douglas fir, allowing it to become a dominant species through much of the area. Cultural fires were even more common in the drier eastern forests, removing underbrush and producing conditions to support indigenous food systems and travel routes.
These forests and mountains provided all sorts of food – berries, roots, fish, deer, bear – and materials for baskets and other material culture, especially from cedar species. "[C]edar, naturally, is one of our most precious trees," said Vi Hilbert (1918-2008), an Upper Skagit leader and preserver of the Lushootseed language (Hilbert, 57). Known as the "tree of life," cedars provided wood for building and art, as well as bark that could be woven into mats, baskets, and clothing. For Native peoples, the North Cascades were a homeland filled with life useful and familiar that, along with salmon that swam in the streams coursing through the forests, furnished foundations for a thriving life.
European and American Incursions
When Europeans and Americans began visiting the Northwest, the forests along the shores and the river valleys leading into the mountains attracted their attention. Spanish and British maritime explorers observed the mountains and forests with interest in how they might be exploited for future inhabitants. This continued when Americans began exploring the North Cascades, including those searching for railroad routes through the thick forests and steep mountains, such as George McClellan, who reached the eastern edge of the mountains near Lake Chelan in 1853, and D. C. Linsley, who crossed Suiattle Pass in 1870. Miners scrambled through the forests in their effort to find gold, silver, and other minerals.
From the start of colonization, forests provided a resource-rich setting for exploration, exploitation, and settlement. These early formal and informal explorations gathered information about these forests to be used for settlement, even if much of the North Cascades geography – the big rushing rivers and steep mountain slopes – slowed commercial exploitation and settlement. Beginning in the 1850s, this began occurring on the edges of the forests.
New Land Regimes and Economic Patterns
In the 1850s, territorial governor Isaac Stevens (1818-1862) imposed treaties on tribes across the Northwest and asserted American sovereignty over most of the land outside reserved tribal lands. This transfer of ownership into the American legal regime allowed newcomers to claim the North Cascades forests. After treaties extinguished title to land in the forests of the North Cascades, control of land went in several directions.
Homesteaders and miners took advantage of federal laws, such as the Homestead Act, allowing them to claim land title. Quick mining rushes could bring thousands into places such as Ruby Creek, but most of these communities were fleeting, lasting from a few months to a few decades. Occasionally, these mining towns amid the forests were repurposed as vacation or recreational communities, such as Monte Cristo and Holden. Such towns helped develop and extend infrastructure including railroads and roads into the forests.
At the same time – and often the same people – loggers arrived along streams where they could transport logs easily. Along the Skagit River, for example, several hundred men across 16 camps were cutting 80 million board feet annually as early as 1888. Loggers in these camps faced dangerous and often unhealthy conditions, where many were injured on the job or suffered from infectious diseases that spread easily in crowded bunkhouses. Technologies evolved from axes to crosscut saws to steam donkey engines that allowed loggers further reach into the North Cascades forests. Although some loggers worked independently, most worked for companies that formed and disappeared often quite rapidly, while other businesses consolidated into larger companies often connected to mills.
In constructing towns, forests were critical. Sawmills closely followed the earliest non-Native settlers. Small mills were easy to establish and fulfilled a key need for local construction. They also offered a way to wealth. On both sides of the Cascades, small communities such as Entiat and Concrete used nearby forests to develop their towns and economies. In Whatcom County, several dozen shingle mills and sawmills quickly scattered through small communities pushing into the eastern part of the county where forests grew in abundance. Histories of communities scattered in the forests of the North Cascades invariably tell of the mills being established almost simultaneous with the first settlers.
Although these small mills might serve local needs, the North Cascades soon provided timber for larger markets and mills. The earliest enterprises connected to maritime trade and coastal towns that grew into cities such as Everett and Bellingham. These places initially exploited the forests closer to saltwater and the rivers that fed into it, but in time, timber from the foothills flowed to the mills and connected to an international economy. Nothing proved more important to this development than the close relationship between railroads and timberlands.
Railroads and the Forests
Even though the Northern Pacific Railroad cut through the Cascades just to the south, it still played a role in timberland development in the North Cascades. In 1864, the federal government granted the corporation millions of acres of the public domain to help facilitate the construction of a transcontinental railroad. The company received alternating sections of land in a checkerboard pattern 40 miles wide along the route. This included millions of acres in Washington, including the North Cascades.
The Great Northern Railway, headed by James J. Hill (1838-1916), built its line through Stevens Pass without the benefit of federal land grants. Because the Great Northern had to pay its own way, it developed markets more conscientiously along its route to ensure the rail line would carry resources and manufactured goods once it was completed. During and after construction, small communities in the mountains, such as Index, grew with the emerging connections to urban markets. In 1893, this transcontinental line connected Puget Sound to the Midwest with links going even beyond. But Hill planned more than a railroad; his vision, according to historian Norman H. Clark, was "to build cities that would work the timber from the vast land grants of the Northern Pacific and feed freight to the Great Northern Railroad" (Clark, 59). Hill was known as the "Empire Builder" for good reasons, although of course Hill was not alone. Other industrialists invested in lumber and shingle mills along Puget Sound’s edge that depended on North Cascades forests.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Hill also controlled the Northern Pacific, including its vast timberland holdings. In 1900, he sold 900,000 acres to his St. Paul, Minnesota, neighbor, Frederick Weyerhaeuser (1834-1914), who formed the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company and opened a mill in Everett that was the largest in the world. In 1902, it produced 28 million board feet and grew to 70 million board feet by 1912.
Along the route through Stevens Pass, the timber economy grew in the early twentieth century. Leavenworth and surrounding communities developed a strong timber economy with large mills, many of them owning large blocks of forest. The Lamb-Davis Lumber Company, for example, incorporated in 1903 with $250,000. In a few years, it employed 300 laborers and could produce in a day as much as 120,000 board feet of lumber, 25,000 board feet of lath, and 30,000 board feet of lumber for boxes. By 1917, when the company sold to the Great Northern Lumber Company (not associated with the railroad), it controlled 650 million board feet of timber across many thousands of forested acres. The company thrived until the Great Depression.
The west side of Stevens Pass included similar communities in the foothills that depended on timber. In Skykomish, Bloedel Donovan Lumber Mills took over from Skykomish Lumber and turned out hundreds of thousands of board feet of lumber daily from the beginning of the century through World War II.
The timber economy that was developing was "often ruthless extraction of maximum profits," according to Clark (76). This approach, common across resource economies, sparked calls for reform.
Responses to Exploitation
At the turn of the twentieth century, two types of exploitation in the forests received attention. The first involved labor. Loggers and millworkers faced difficult and dangerous working conditions throughout the North Cascades, as they did elsewhere. Many organized in unions, including the Industrial Workers of the World. Reports of poor camp conditions concerning safety, working hours, and food quality circulated in union newspapers, shedding light especially on the foothills in Western Washington east of the Skagit Valley. Strikes happened periodically. When World War I broke out, the Wobblies (members of the IWW) and other unions organized strikes throughout the state. Conflict reached its violent height in 1916 in the so-called "Everett Massacre" when Wobblies coming from Seattle tried to dock in Everett. Shots were fired, and the Wobblies retreated. Altogether, almost 50 people were wounded, with a disputed death count between seven and 14.
The power of the military helped improve conditions when, during the war, soldiers organized loggers into a new union called the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumberman (4-Ls). Although it did not represent a true grassroots movement of loggers, the power behind it helped improve some of the most exploitative conditions in North Cascades logging camps and mills.
The other type of exploitation that was addressed concerned conservation. Part of the larger progressive movement, conservationists believed only government could be strong enough to balance industrial power such as Hill’s. They directed much of their energy at forests. Conservationists, growing in national power, warned of a timber famine. In 1891, they convinced Congress to pass legislation that authorized presidents to create forest reserves. President Grover Cleveland created the Washington Forest Reserve, some 3,594,240 acres in the North Cascades, on February 22, 1897. Because of the checkerboard pattern of land grants, the Northern Pacific held roughly a million acres within the boundaries of the reserve. Many Washingtonians disliked the new reserves, but large timber owners recognized that it drove up the value of their private holdings.
The Washington reserve soon became part of a growing national system administered by the U.S. Forest Service starting in 1905 and called national forests beginning in 1907. (Names and boundaries shifted over time. The North Cascades included parts of several national forests: Mount Baker, Snoqualmie, Okanogan [formerly Chelan], and Wenatchee. In 1973, Mount Baker and Snoqualmie combined; in 2007, Okanogan and Wenatchee did.) The Forest Service managed its holdings for what came to be called multiple use – primarily timber, watershed, wildlife, grazing, and recreation. The forests of the North Cascades served all these roles, although grazing was the minor partner, while timber was most important economically.
To protect these valuable resources, the Forest Service and private timber companies worked to protect the forests from fire. In 1908, the Washington Forest Fire Association was established. Fire lookouts appeared through the North Cascades in subsequent years on public and private land, especially expanding in the 1930s. The Forest Service functioned as a fire service as much as anything in its early years, believing any fire should be put out as soon as possible. These practices, while sensible from an economic position, often robbed ecosystems, especially the eastern ponderosa pine forests, of an element that had long been a regular part of the forest. Fire suppression also was incomplete. Big fire years on the Wenatchee National Forest, for example, occurred in 1910, 1917, 1926, and 1929.
Recreational Development
Despite federal conservation and the burgeoning Northwest timber economy, most of the North Cascades forests remained relatively inaccessible with no railroads or roads getting very deep into the forests. The forests were more intact than most parts of the Pacific Northwest. Stunning peaks, with hundreds of glaciers, inspired many who ventured deep into the woods. In the era between the world wars, conservationists in and out of the government called to protect the area and keep it as wilderness, free from commercial development and permanent settlements.
Recreation development on the national forests included summer cabin sites, ski lodges, and campgrounds. Frederick W. Cleator (1883-1957) became a key figure in recreational planning throughout the Pacific Northwest. In part because of Cleator’s influence, by 1931 the North Cascades forests included a primitive area around the Picket Range and recreational units around both Mount Baker and Glacier Peak. These designations amounted to nearly 500,000 acres, and the agency kept adding protected acres as the importance and popularity of recreation increased.
Robert Marshall, one of the founders of the Wilderness Society and federal forester, brought the North Cascades to national attention as a great wilderness with superb scenic qualities in the first issue of The Living Wilderness. While acknowledging some of the area already protected, Marshall called for more forests to be kept roadless in what he called "one of the most stupenduously [sic] scenic areas in the United States" (Marshall, 10). Marshall and Cleator surveyed the undeveloped region around Glacier Peak in 1939 and called for the agency to protect these roadless areas so that there would be nearly an unbroken wilderness in the region. By the time World War II started, well over a million acres of national forest land sat in protected recreation status, largely centered around the volcanic peaks Mount Baker and Glacier Peak and the picturesque Picket Range. A lot of early recreational enthusiasm centered on mountain climbing, including early trips by The Mountaineers, but the old-growth forests became a feature, too. By the mid-twentieth century, conflict focused great and sustained attention on the forests of the North Cascades, leading to a significant change.
Clashes in the Forest
At a national and regional level, national forests primarily served a custodial role in the early twentieth century. Local mills often purchased federal timber, but the vast majority of logging happened on private forests. After World War II, however, the Forest Service shifted policy and asked more of its lands, responding to the decline of private forest production and the rise in construction needs. This pressure included the forested North Cascades. At the same time, more Americans discovered the value of backpacking and leaving wilderness alone, especially as hikers saw and heard the clearcuts loggers made as they walked through the White Chuck River Valley and similar places in the North Cascades. These trends collided in the mid-1950s in a series of contests in the North Cascades, bringing national attention to the region’s forests.
In 1955, political scientist Grant McConnell, who spent his summers in Stehekin at the remote end of Lake Chelan, heard rumors of an impending timber sale. He grew alarmed at the idea of the Agnes Creek drainage being logged, because it was within one of the protected boundaries the Forest Service had established. The agency, however, was reclassifying its lands, jeopardizing the forests within the boundaries. Writing in the Sierra Club Bulletin in 1956, McConnell praised the region’s good fortune in having such a beautiful place "yet uncut by roads, almost wholly undisturbed by commercialization" (McConnell, 29). Other regional conservationists, including Philip (1924-2013) and Laura Zalesky (1924-2016), Polly Dyer (1920-2016), and Patrick Goldsworthy (1919-2013) shared a similar concern and established the North Cascades Conservation Council (N3C) in 1957 to advocate. Meanwhile, pressure built in the woods.
Trade associations including the Industrial Forestry Association and the Western Pine Association, along with individual companies, such as the Chelan Box Manufacturing Company, saw it wasteful to leave merchantable timber within protected boundaries. They also disliked the principle of protected wilderness lands and feared the Forest Service would expand these protections. Timber interests were not satisfied when the Forest Service excluded tens of thousands of acres in forested river valleys; they asked for more land to be made available on both the eastern and western slopes. Wilderness advocates pushed back and came out in force at public hearings, which forced the Forest Service to relent and add back some of its cuts when it created the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area in 1960. Four years later, Congress passed the Wilderness Act, and Glacier Peak became one of the original areas preserved.
Still, N3C, the Sierra Club, The Mountaineers, and others felt betrayed and rallied for a national park, which would take hundreds of thousands of acres from the Forest Service. They put out films (Wilderness Alps of Stehekin) and books (The Wild Cascades: A Forgotten Parkland) that brought the beauty of the forests and mountains to a wide audience. In The Wild Cascades, Northwest writer and conservationist Harvey Manning (1925-2006) acknowledged the park would stop logging in the park and reduce jobs but argued that greater economic benefits would replace them. Besides, "the case rests on whether the area is deserving, on its own merits, of national park status," Manning wrote, "and of that there can be no reasonable doubt" (Manning, 117).
After federal studies, public hearings, and many compromises, President Lyndon Johnson signed North Cascades National Park into law, creating a national park complex that included a park and two recreation areas (Chelan and Ross Lake), as well as designated wilderness. At the time, the Wenatchee World called the enabling legislation, a "masterpiece of political compromise. No special interest got exactly what it wanted. But all special interests won some concessions" (Danner, 202).
Evolving Values
Timber interests had opposed the creation of the national park because it excluded merchantable timber from logging. Through much of Washington’s history, the political power of the timber industry was dominant, but as the conflict in the North Cascades demonstrated, it was slipping from that position. Technological and economic changes in the industry, especially automation and log exports, reduced employment drastically. Besides these factors within the industry, environmental laws were strengthened in the 1970s and ultimately restricted logging in habitat critical for endangered species. This led to what is commonly known as the Timber Wars that occurred through the 1980s and 1990s.
The forests of the North Cascades were not on the front line in these battles, but region-wide policies such as the Northwest Forest Plan, which sharply reduced logging on federal lands in Washington, affected the timber industry in the North Cascades. By 1992, Weyerhaeuser had closed its last mill in Everett, a symbolic signal of the changing place of timber from the North Cascades forests. Other mills continued there, but the city once known as the City of Smokestacks revitalized without smokestacks in sight. Similarly, the Georgia-Pacific mill in Bellingham closed in 2007, ending a 150-year history of mills in downtown Bellingham. Mills continue to hang on in communities, but their share of employment and overall economic and political significance diminished in a diversified regional economy.
Even on state lands, new values emerged and changed management. Washington received millions of acres of forest lands from the federal government at the time of statehood. More acres were added to the state forest system in the 1920s and 1930s when the state took over land in tax delinquency – typically forests that had been cut and abandoned. By statute, these trust lands are required to produce revenue for the public benefit. Managed by the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR), these forests are scattered across the state, including in the North Cascades, along the flanks of federal forests, and near the Puget Sound coast south of Bellingham.
For most of their history, state forest lands were managed to maximize revenue, which generally meant logging. The revenue went to local communities. Blanchard State Forest, for example, used revenue to support schools, the public hospital district, and other local public services in Skagit County. Conservationists have challenged this management, calling for new approaches in a time of climate change and an ongoing biodiversity crisis. In 2022, the Washington State Supreme Court decided in Conservation Northwest v. Commissioner of Public Land that DNR was not required to log forests to maximize revenue. Instead, the state could manage the land more flexibly, including managing the forests for ecological resilience.
When lumbering started in the North Cascades, the prime value of forests was economic. By late in the twentieth century, other values had ascended, including protecting biodiversity. Hilbert, the Upper Skagit leader, said, "Parks are needed because we must protect ancient trees that are a bosom, the nursemaid which nurtures all other plants and creatures that depend on trees that have existed for centuries. The National Park Service, if it takes the long view of things instead of shortsighted profit, can protect that. I hope it will always be true" (Hilbert, 61). Three decades later, in 2024, the federal government announced a plan to reintroduce the endangered grizzly bear to the North Cascades.
