t o S P E C I A L I Z E i n S O M E T H I N G .
'There is more information of a higher order of sophistication and complexity stored in a few square yards of forest than there is in all of the libraries of mankind.'
~ Gary Snyder
Big Beaver Valley, North Cascades National Park, Washington
© 2013 All Rights Reserved Half | Light Photography
I had the chance to meet him once. Patrick Goldsworthy. This past January at my first board meeting of the North Cascades Conservation Council actually (the conservation group he helped form with a few others back in the sixties as he witnessed the valleys and trees of the North Cascades disappearing… falling). This is the guy we all have to thank for there being a North Cascades National Park. A Pasayten Wilderness. A Glacier Peak Wilderness.
A Big Beaver Valley.
Earlier this summer I walked the valley again en route to climb Luna Peak. Ten miles in. Along the way invisible in the photograph above lost in the scale is one of the finest stands of Western Red Cedar on the planet. Trees fifteen feet in diameter towering nearly two hundred feet. A thousand years old. My climbing partner Keith stood next to one staring up while I steadied to take a photograph of him in the shadow of its sheer immensity. Awesome.
Pat knew this. Buried in all of his efforts is the bit how he had helped prevent the now little-known-but-not-entirely-dead project referred to as 'High Ross Dam.'
After a hike with Harvey Manning and others shortly after the park was established in 1968 he wrote how 'We went up Little Beaver Valley and down Big Beaver Valley [and] came through tremendous forests of great cedar trees.' Of the many oddities and bizarre outcomes of the struggled creation of North Cascades National Park is the designation of Ross Lake National Recreation Area (wherein which about a five-mile portion of Big Beaver Valley lies). Had this area been included in the national park Seattle City Light would not have been able to dam the Skagit.
The trouble was… they already had.
Upper Skagit River Valley before the dam…
Once upon a not-so-long-time ago the Skagit River inked a squiggly line on the map in the rugged northeastern corner of what would eventually become North Cascades National Park. Then - in 1937 - Ross Dam was built and by 1940 reached a height of thirteen-hundred-and-eighty feet above the sea. Named after the first and now-long dead superintendent for Seattle City Light J.D. Ross - though an appreciable man still one whose grand design favored flooding over flowers - it soared to a whopping sixteen-hundred-and-fifteen feet above sea level by 1949 (its present-day height).
And so the valley in the photo above through which the Skagit once wildly coursed on its way to the ocean was erased.
It was the Hetch Hetchy of the Pacific Northwest. A whole valley gone. Vast. Lost. In a blog report from the North Cascades Institute published a couple of years ago about an annual educational trip up-lake aboard the Ross Lake Mule the author mentions her keen awareness of how 'our class floats over what was once a pristine forest' now gone. The upper Skagit Valley looked no different then - before the dam - than the Big Beaver does now. But since the dams had been built and the valley destroyed it could not be included in a national park. Hence why a map of North Cascades National Park looks more like a puzzle missing more than a few important pieces than a whole wilderness rescued.
But Seattle City Light was not finished with its grand design.
They intended to raise the already-five-hundred-forty-foot dam an additional one-hundred-twenty-two feet (to an elevation of seventeen hundred twenty-five feet above sea level) in a fourth and final stage of its construction. This addition would flood a large portion of Big Beaver Valley (and almost five thousand acres of Canadian wilderness to the north). The millennial-old cedars would vanish from memory.
After a confrontation between the city of Seattle, Goldworthy's North Cascades Conservation Council, and a similar group in British Columbia that stretched out stalemate after stalemate for nearly fifteen years… a settlement was finally reached in 1984. Seattle would pay the Canadians twenty-some million dollars a year for thirty-five years. Each of those years the Canadians would return the favor by giving the city about forty megawatts of electricity. The dollar amount was equal to what the High Dam construction would have cost while the energy output added up to what it would have provided in power.
Not entirely dead though the High Dam as the agreement states… halted assuredly only for a period of eighty years (through 2066 in order to see out the terms of a previous agreement lasting ninety-nine years reached back in 1967 just before the national park was created). The shortsightedness of building dams trumped the foresight of Goldsworthy and others to protect these trees. Valleys. Ecosystems. And so they remain vulnerable.
Pat had said simply… 'When [we] went through the cedar forests [of Big Beaver Valley] and saw what was going to happen there it was devastating.' Devastating.
But fast-forward…
Big Beaver remains… for now. And the stately trees. And the wilderness in which they call home. We can still walk past them gawking upwardly in silence and awe not quite able to see their crowns lost in the mess of branches and sky and wonder. Let us hope that in forty years there is another Pat. Another someone who can fight for trees that lack a voice some fail to respect or cannot hear.
"I began to realize that you can't get involved in everything, though there are a lot of things that need involvement," he once said. "I developed the philosophy that the way to do this is to specialize in something… specialize. So I decided fairly early when I came to Seattle... the Cascades just fascinated me."
As they do me.
Thank you Patrick. Thank you for saving this most special and wild of places for all of us who have followed your wisdom and footsteps into these mountains.
Patrick Donovan Goldsworthy
1919 - 2013
S O U R C E S
