The North Cascades Institute grows lifelong connections to North Cascades National Park

written by Daniel O’Neil | photography by North Cascades Institute

True story—back in 1986, a group of backcountry rangers were sitting around a fire in North Cascades National Park discussing how to connect more people with the park, still over-shadowed by Washington’s other national parks. These rangers knew that if they could bring more people to love North Cascades National Park, to experience for themselves the beauty and magic of that place, they’d be inspiring individual stewards and champions for keeping the park wild and its ecosystem healthy.

The park’s superintendent liked the idea and gave the group an empty desk and a phone at headquarters. Soon enough, they were taking small groups of adults into the park’s wilderness to do anything from wildlife tracking to learning about glaciers at eye level. They hosted art retreats as well: writing classes, poetry retreats, photography or watercolor workshops. By now the former rangers were running a nonprofit they called the North Cascades Institute.

Today, NCI introduces more people than ever to the wonders and significance of North Cascades National Park. Having originally given classes in campgrounds, using old army tents for shelter, NCI now operates out of the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center on the shore of Diablo Lake, right in the park’s center. The center’s lodges, classrooms and dining hall allow for educational activities nearly year-round, including a high school backcountry program called Youth Leadership Adventures, family camps and boat tours. NCI also cooperates closely with tribes, the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe in particular.

Now forty years into its mission, NCI offers online presentations and emphasizes outreach to Whatcom and Skagit county communities that wouldn’t necessarily have the opportunity to visit the park. Some programming is multilingual, for example. “We want to bring everybody along to teach them how amazing this ecosystem is, how lucky we are to live here and how important it is to do the best we can to protect it, and even to restore it, so that we’re passing it on to future generations,” said Christian Martin, NCI communications and marketing manager.

Younger generations have been especially important to NCI’s work since the beginning. Only a few years into its efforts, NCI’s founders realized that to create conservation stewards for the park, they needed to start early. So in 1990, they initiated a program called Mountain School that still brings local fifth-grade classes and teachers up to North Cascades National Park for a three-day, two-night environmental education program.

“That really changed the organization because now we weren’t just doing cool little field trips with adults,” Martin said. “It’s really neat to see that some of our earliest students that came up as kids are now teachers in these schools bringing their classrooms up thirty years later.”

For John Fahey, who teaches fifth grade at Centennial Elementary School in the Mount Vernon School District, “Mountain School provides hands-on learning immersed in nature while using a curriculum that also connects with state standards.” Fahey has brought students to Mountain School for the last twenty-five years.

Fahey incorporates Mountain School into his classroom throughout the school year, referencing the important lessons it teaches not just about the environment but also about relations between individuals and the community, and about self-development.

“While students are learning about the systems within a forest ecosystem and the cultural significance of the North Cascades, they are building confidence in themselves and strengthening trust with their peers,” Fahey said. “Once they start learning about the systems of life within a forest ecosystem, they start making connections to their own personal lives. This is where the true learning begins.”

With such a wide range of adults and youth now connecting with North Cascades National Park, who knows how future fireside conversations will lead to further enhancing, protecting and loving the park and local communities that NCI helps support.

To learn more about experiences with NCI, visit www.ncascades.org