North Cascades: People, Places and Stories; Fred Beckey

The. North Cascades people places and stories is made possible in part by. Are ya encouraging people of all backgrounds and ages to get out enjoy and support our public lands including North Cascades National Park. Sorry I invite you to gear up for hiking camping and cycling equipment information at local stores or Ari I dug out an additional support by the Wilderness Society and by gcd has nine members. Thank you. The Cascades in the. High are some of the most beautiful mountains and you can see the well in. The North Cascades ecosystem is one of the largest intact ecosystems in the lower 48. Home to wolves grizzly bears Wolverines two thirds of all of the glaciers in the lower 48. And yet you can drive here. In 90 minutes and have one to fill in ventures. The North Cascades is a dramatic place of deep green hillsides

and rock faces raked by streamers of cloud. Reaming glaciers riven by crevices Rivers racing under grey skies and Ravens rolling on the wind. Hello and welcome to North Cascades. People places and stories I'm America's siRNA the North Cascades is one of our country's best kept secrets founded by the Canadian border to the north I-90 to the south the Puget Sound to the west and the Okanagan Highlands and Columbia plateau to the east. It features one of the most ecologically diverse landscapes in the world. It's home to a national park to national forests more glaciers than any other place in our country outside of Alaska and more than 300 peaks above 7000 feet in elevation. Much of the North Cascades ecosystem is wilderness attracting climbers and

hikers from all over the world. Most enter the wilderness carrying one of these a becke guide The Indispensable Guide book for back country usage. The person who wrote The Bacchae guides is an icon of the North Cascades with more first ascents than anyone else in history. A legendary and colorful friend Becky. Fred Becky is a legend. He's a curmudgeon in a way he's kind of the ghost of the north eighty six year old Fred Becky is definitely colorful. He's just an amazing unusual human being. Fred's been climbing in the North Cascades for seven decades. Here's film of him climbing lighthouse tower near Leavenworth in one thousand forty nine. Fred undoubtedly has probably done the most first first offensive anywhere in the world. I mean not only in the Cascades but other ranges. I don't think anyone. Has piled up a list of First Descents like he has. He put climbing routes up all over the North Cascades and really all over the mountains of western North America.

I'm not here as a keeping score about climbing routes or mountains so a lot of people seem to do that. To me climbing is not a. Sport where your conservative right is surely numbers. In addition to blazing climbing routes throughout the North Cascades around the world. Fred is best known for his encyclopedic guidebook. When I started here there was really no guidebook to the Cascades. I guess more or less on a whim decided to put out a guidebook. Anybody who goes North Cascades ends up looking at Fred Becky's book he wrote the first god of the North Cascades in the 50s. He now has the three part series on the Cascade Range. Two of those volumes are just on the North Cascades. The thing that strikes me about it is that he's done so much but he's very humble about it. Among the thousands of back country hikers and climbers inspired by friend Becky is young mountaineers I beg.

Yeah definitely is these. They're they're pretty much the quintessential guide to the North Cascades. There's no better at there. It's got all the information you need to get to the crime. Has this captions are nice because they don't they don't. You know they don't give us step by step and they kind of leave out ambiguity. Oh you bet. They get you to the time. Here's a visual sense of what climbers like Fred and Steph experience when they reach the summit of a rugged peak in the North Cascades. The North Cascades I think you know extremely different type of terrain. We don't have many peaks over 9000 feet just a few of them but we start very low and that's what I think sets it off and that that add on the amount of glaciation. So Fred tell me why do you why. I don't have any aspiration for it because I'm interested in doing it. And. Maybe there's some kind of. Innate

obsession that I can't explain. Maybe a lot of risk involved and that we're looking for maybe a little bit more excitement than. The produce of any in a team sport. Even if you can't make it up those as hard climbs anymore he's still out there you know going part way up and getting up to high base camp or something like that. He's still working at it still doing some rock climbing still doesn't mean he's unstoppable. Amazing guy. When Fred Becky discovered the majesty and the wildness of the North Cascades in the 1930s as a young person he was pretty much on his own. Today hundreds of young people each year are provided in enriching hands on learning opportunity to discover the uniqueness of the North Cascades ecosystem at a place called Mountain School. Maybe it's a baby a banana slug. And among school is our first real youth program.

There's a little slogan on your dominantly a three day program that's designed to get kids up here to experience the Cascades and learn about what makes it work is a little slow great. There. You see. There is a considerable. Gap and I'm not going to try I try operated by the North Cascades Institute Mountain School is located at the environmental Learning Center on the OBX lonely in the North Cascades National Park. Sure we're going to do is an activity called One teacher so it's a chance for all of you to become teachers. Say you're going to do my job I'm going to teach you and then you get here. There is a concern that kids are getting disconnected from nature and if they would get too disconnected then they will not be the stored of the North Cascades in the future this is the people. And. They actually go to all really really modern school teachers encourage students to learn through discovery.

We have something around us it's what we call animal sight see if you guys notice anything animal signs around. The on the trees. Look. This guy. Is reborn. Wow you guys have any idea what might have been. Messing with. On a. Day only the like of. You can feel that even if it's just a little bit. It's a completely different way of teaching and it's really powerful for kids to. Discover an answer through games and highly interactive activities. Students learn about the ecosystem and how everything is related here. I am a Beatles and I can be either a consumer or a D composer and I eat plants or help decompose trees and I think I'm going to give this to Harley because she's a tree the other so much with

TV and video games and the technology that the I'm just getting out on to trails and smelling the air that you know kids connecting with nature is one of the most beneficial things about coming up here. Bill let's take a look at our calendar was I out already. And. I want to go right now but I believe that. It's really an introduction to an environment that most of whose kids have never looked at closely if they looked at it at all and then you know that's how. You know this is true. Oh. Yes pretty go to summer and soil and we give the soil back to some of the farmers here in disguise about it. And they use that sort of grow the food that we eat dinner time. Cycle. When kids come to Mountain School I think when I'm looking for is is the engagement. I wish for. The more wildlife and. Rules come to. Come to this place. I want them to have a powerful. From an experience. And summing up with. Them. We're creating stewards for the future.

We're creating people who because they come and they have fine and they learn a little bit of farming great memory is going to care about this place. I wish all of the animals that. Are going to care about this place for the rest of their lives. And I hope we will work to protect this place and maybe protect a place that's close to home. We learned about how Rockstar can't are in three different kinds of igneous made in March and. Sediment Terry. And. So we learned quite a few things here. You would. Be there to them even if it's raining a lot. Yeah it's still fun even though it's raining. It's because then you just get refresh and wet. Like me right now. Mountain School students learn about the plants and animals in the North Cascades ecosystem how everything is in or elated and what happens when a native plant

or animal disappears for years and iconic predator native to the North Cascades has been missing its recent return to the ecosystem has some people rejoicing and others howling with concern. They just asked the three pigs Red Riding-Hood or Peter the wolf is bad news. Thanks to fairy tales fiction and folklore. Few animals have such lousy PR woes more so than any other creature in my experience. Paul tend to polarize people when it comes to well if issues and so you get very vocal opponents very vocal proponents. Not a lot of people in the middle sometimes removed from the North Cascades to go hunting and trapping wolves around money issues for decades. Then recently we have a wildlife monitoring program that started about eight years ago. There is no way it was to see if we could document

the grizzly bear in the North Cascades though the motion sensitive cameras have yet to get pictures of the grizzly. They do capture something else. I remember getting the phone call from one of our field staff said Jasmine are you sitting down. And I said yes what is it. He said Well one of our cameras got a picture of what we think might be a wolf. And not only that but there's six pups we've actually been able to document a pack here in the madhouse Valley. And it's the first fully documented pack in Washington 70 years what I think is really great about it is that it's a natural return. They weren't planted or transplanted they just came back all on their own which I think is a good thing because I think it shows that maybe this is a place where the environment isn't deteriorating and that wildlife habitat if anything is maybe improving instead of going the other way and I love that thought. Come on. For a cattle rancher for most of us a wolf doesn't necessarily make the cattle business any better. But he's the biggest money is always the most angry.

So Craig is a rancher in the Med Valley near Winthrop. I'm certainly not a wolf expert but it's reasonable to assume that they're going to eat something and that might be livestock. We want to protect as much as we can there. The ranching that goes on it so we want to protect those ranchers and make sure their livelihood works at the same time. More and more people here really are much more supportive of the natural wildlife that might occur like the world so I think a program that are trying to put in place where they would pay ranchers for loss is the way to go about it. If we want to help livestock stay in that house as an option for land on Earth then I think we have to consider. Compensating those ranchers for livestock they get ate for crag and other ranchers. The wolves currently pose little threat to their cattle. The wolves are going to have the growing numbers to probably. Catch up with the challenges we have of the two legged predators. I mean we have it's hardly a year goes by that we don't find one that's

been killed on the range from a human being. For now the welcome mat is out for the wolf. It's a symbol of the wildness of this country. And there is economic potential in people coming to visit and explore and helping to catch a glimpse or hear the wolf. And now in the North Cascades for the first time in decades you can hear the walls how again. There's just a certain connection there that people make with these animals and when you hear and see them in the wild it really is a moving experience. And I think just the opportunity to have that experience in the North Cascades is worth caring about. Now for some the return of the wolves to the North Cascades is a sign the ecosystem is healthy. Another sign of health is a consistent pattern of natural

wildfires to regenerate the forests and reduce the threat of catastrophic fires. Yet more than a century of controlling wildfires has the ecosystem out of balance. And that is fire experts and landowners in high risk areas very concerned. I'm Brendan McLaughlin. It started with a single bolt of lightning and soon under storm turned into a fire storm. An annual rite of nature in the west and here in Washington the Washington firestorm of 1994 was one of the worst ever the worst in more than 20 years. A giant firestorm in 1994 devastates 200000 acres near Leavenworth and she lands destroys 37 homes and brings in firefighters from all over the country. Right now this fire storm is creating its own wind you can see behind me just everything is just blowing very quickly. While fire is an ecological process pure and simple it's always been there until we

came along and suppressed it. We've had over 150 years of fire suppression in the ecosystem that has changed the vegetation that has built up large fuel loads and then add onto that a rapidly changing climate. Where where that forest is becoming more stressed where the burn season is longer and what we're seeing are fires that were considered abnormally large Tanner 20 years ago are now becoming the norm. Those Smokey Bear has urged visitors and residents for decades to be careful. Wildfires are going to happen. For people who live in high risk areas such as the north of Leavenworth community events such as this one on Red Tail Canyon farm help landowners to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire.

How doable it is prescribed fire on a small family for. Foreigners. Today is an opportunity to meet with a lot of landowners. And just show them the range of opportunities that they have. To be able to move. The fire fuels that are around their homes. Chipper on steroids has demonstrated one way to treat farm fuel. This could be considered a fuel break. We need the big trees take out the brush and the small stuff when all the trees up. And then this is a nice area to try and stop a fire here. You could still have brush it's perfect wildlife habitat good forage. You need the diversity in the forest in order to maintain that healthy sustainable ecosystem. But by creating that healthy forest it will allow fire to go through and not

completely burn and that. This is a very good example of how it can turn out. This is an area that's been treated and there still are lots of nice trees to enjoy. But they've created fire defensible spaces around all the buildings here. It's a mixed bag here on the ranch. There's one of me and there's a lot of it as far as fuel and food. And we've been working away at it over the years. There are more straight line just straight through there. In addition to helping private landowners the Forest Service is reducing the risk on public lands through controlled burns. One of the goals with our fuels reduction projects are to reduce those latter fuels reduce surface fuels and create gaps in the canopy so that we don't get crown fire. Since many North Cascade forests are overgrown due to fire suppression for so many years the threat of fire storms isn't going away any time soon.

This is not a problem that will be fixed in a couple of years. This is a problem that will take decades to address because we're talking hundreds of thousands of acres over which this this exists. So fire is just like rain and it's like snow. It's a it's a natural process that is creates the dynamics of natural systems and it needs to happen. It's not something you want coming towards your house or towards your human structure of any kind and that's where a fire is not good in a natural setting away from that from the human built environment. It needs to be. Used. Now in a sense while faras perform a stewardship role in helping to keep the ecosystem healthy human store and ship to preserve protect and

maintain the fragile North Cascades ecosystem is equally important especially when it involves young people. Do you see something over there that looks kind of like this picture. And if you look across the way on a crisp autumn day at the Diablo lake overflowed I don't know if you all knew this but this place is the most visited place in the North Cascades National Park. A new conservation project is blooming. Thanks to these kids from Concrete Washington I think what we're going to start with is going to dig some plants. Everybody ready to do a little work in. One of these who wants one to be zero. OK member who live down by your side. I'm not really. This is actually our very first field trip as part of a year long program that's called first bloom. Well when you look at her tits. I'm sure and it's a native plant program so these kids who are digging up all these plants their first time they're asking great questions they're learning all about native plants.

We have the graphic that we want to keep and we have a bunch of different kinds of weeds that we don't want. And eventually they'll be learning how to design and develop their own native plant garden which they will plant one at their school that they'll design and then they'll plant one back here in the spring trying to get the grass out and static. It's important to teach them now to take care of their surroundings and their environment because we have more and more problems every day with. The environment. It's only when it's March come. This way we can get them outside moving their bodies socially interacting with each other but also learning lots of science. On learning design in math a lot a lot of the same skills you learn in the classroom but you can only chance to do hands on them and it sticks it sticks with them when they do it that way. You got it. You pick the biggest want to test their shapes some letters are getting young people

involved at an early age is what stewardship is all about. We have in the last couple of years we've actually doubled the number of volunteers that are working part time when I'm so. Good you. Know this is a you are actually. Going to. Have a gun. That's because we believe the national parks are owned by all Americans. And when you exercise that right of ownership when you care for something like you care for your house or your yard when you physically take care of it it means more to you. So we like to have people come out and help care for the place to return and taking the people over and I hope they walk away knowing that they live in a really special place and they did something really special for their community. We're also hoping just to plant that seed of conservation because it's not just national parks that need to be protected it's all of those green spaces they need to protect their communities and be stewards of those places otherwise such as Thailand's capital.

It's the young people I mean as kids from Concrete who will be called upon to preserve and protect the fragile North Cascades ecosystem and its truly unique and majesty and wildness. It's a majesty and wildness that inspired famous writers such as Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder and continues to inspire many who are grateful to live and work in the North Cascades. I'm grateful to have. Found this place or have it find me. I'm very grateful for all this nature and the beauty of this nature. I'm grateful that I get to not only interact with. The wild life side of the issue but the human side of the issue because that's just as important and fascinating to me. Are the the people and the characters that make up this landscape. But what's great about Seattle is being able to live in a sophisticated city and yet still be so close

to a premier. Some of the best recreation in the world. I thought often if I left here were and live someplace else where would that be. I can't I haven't figured out a spot that would offer as much as that. I'm grateful for the smiles and the laughs of the kids when I see them around the Apple way or on a trail knowing. Back. Then that laughter is stewards of the future. We hope you enjoyed our look at the North Cascades and the people places and stories that make this diverse and beautiful ecosystem one of the most majestic in our country and our world. Ivan thanks for joining us. North Cascades people places and stories is made possible in part by RAII encouraging people of all backgrounds and ages to get out enjoy and support our public

lands including North Cascades National Park. Ari I invite you to gear up for hiking camping and cycling equipment information at local RAII stores or additional support by the Wilderness Society and by nine members thank you. And then these are the questions they care that they might give in even programs. Oh excuse me. We're going to be working on a habitat for that. I don't. Forget.

Yeah dinner very.