If you want to see mountains that look like mountains — sharp, aggressive, white-capped, serious — North Cascades is the park to go to. It doesn't have the accessibility of Rainier or the fame of Glacier, but the terrain is arguably more dramatic than either: vertical walls of dark metamorphic rock rising above jade-colored lakes, glaciers sitting in cirques at every turn, ridgelines so ragged they look like something tore them apart. I went in late July, which is about as good as it gets — snow cleared from the road, wildflowers out in the meadows, the air cool and dry and impossibly clear.
North Cascades National Park sits in the northern Cascades of Washington State, just south of the Canadian border, and it protects the most glaciated terrain in the contiguous United States outside of Alaska — more than 300 glaciers within or near the park boundary. The park is part of a larger complex that includes Ross Lake and Lake Chelan National Recreation Areas, and together they make up a vast stretch of roadless wilderness that sees far fewer visitors than any of the Pacific Northwest's other famous parks. The North Cascades Highway (State Route 20) runs through the recreation areas and offers some of the most dramatic mountain driving in the country.
Diablo Lake, turquoise-green from glacial flour suspended in the water, is visible from a pullout on the highway and consistently stops people in their tracks — the color is so vivid it looks chemically altered, but it's entirely natural. Ross Lake, long and narrow, extends north toward Canada and is accessible primarily by trail or floatplane; the resort there offers floating cabins on the water that are among the more unusual lodging options in the national park system.
For hikers, the park is serious business. Most of the best terrain requires multi-day backpacking trips. Cascade Pass is one of the more accessible high routes — an 8-mile round trip that gains nearly 1,800 feet and emerges into a high glacially carved basin with a view of Johannesburg Mountain that I keep returning to in memory. A few miles further on the ridge, you can look down into both the Stehekin and Cascade river drainages simultaneously.