Cascade Pass With Gary Paull

Hi everybody. Welcome to this video. Gary Paul and myself thinking about a new Nick on the Rocks episode. This is a scouting video and I'll let Gary explain where we are. Yeah so we drove from Darrington up to Marble Mount this morning and then followed the Cascade River Road and the North Fork up here to the Cascade Pass Trailhead. It's about I think 23 miles from Marble Mount. Okay. We were able to drive about 20 of those and we just walked the last portion up the road and we wound up only having to slog through I don't know a quarter mile or so of snow on the way. Yeah we're looking up at Cascade Pass right here and we're talking about it on the way up as being the southernmost pass across the crest where continental ice came out of Canada poured over the top and headed down the other side towards Lake Chelan. Lake Chelan's just on the other side we're looking essentially east over the crest of the Cascades in Washington the North Cascades of Washington. Wow. So this was a historic pass used by thousands of years of people. People people were going over this pass from the east side the west side trading and then able it's a long ways from the other side I'm trying to think it's it's close to 30 miles to Lake Chelan once you get across the pass but then of course you could paddle down the lake boats and trade trade for interior stuff and goats and goat wool and all sorts of things. So this is a low spot in the Cascade crest is it but it's still higher than Snoqualmie is it higher than Stevens and all like or what yeah why isn't this why isn't there a major highway coming over this pass just like the others well it's kind of steep in here okay and getting a road built up these mountainsides and the switchbacking and the hard rock would just was just proved to be more than the road builders could handle I mean they tried and they got up this far and they got up on the other side but getting getting that last bit through here they you know there's talk about tunnels and all sorts of different ways to try to get get through there but it's pretty rough yeah so there was ice crossing back and forth is that why there's a low spot here yeah I was heading from west I believe from west to east over over the top and it rounded it out and if we were way up in the area you'd see it's it's kind of carved out in a more of a kind of a u-shape actual actual pass it's not a sharper rat like we have some of the other ridges I see nearby here yeah the first first thing there right where the clouds hitting above the pass is mix up peak and that's about I believe 7400 feet or so and then the next kind of dark spire there's actually three they're called the triplets and the next one right above us here is uh named cascade cascade so that's kind of interesting cascade it's the one that gets to be called cascade it's not particularly prominent or anything it's much lower than johannesburg above us here which is about 8200 feet we are looking straight up at this thing yeah that's about a good mile above us up there up the summit and if we spin around we're looking down the north fork cascade valley and we're looking at the uh a triad peak in the distance and then we get over this long beautiful sloping snow field yeah you can almost see the skiers up there uh-huh on uh eldorado peak that's where they were going they were going up there okay so back at the yeah back at the truck we we ran into whatever half a dozen or more backcountry skiers and that's where they go eldorado and eldorado is one of the big ones it's just under 9 000 feet and that's a popular skiing destination for kind of backcountry people yeah it's it's become quite popular recently in the last 20 years or so i think you want to keep going how about a little further over we're looking over towards mount torment closer by here that's the that's the diamond that's the pyramid above everybody else right yeah right and then we get in a bunch of woods and the woods are handy here because that's where the trail to cascade pass climbs up through switchbacks i can't remember the number 36 or something switchbacks through the trees and then does a long traverse all the way over through some talus and past the goats and the bear and everything over to uh over to the pass so do people do that do they cross the cascades on that trail and and cross over the pct and then drop down to stahikon yeah there's a lot of things you can do you can go over the pass you can hike down um hike down to high bridge which is a long ways oh yeah and catch the shuttle bus and go down to lake chelan right or you can before you get there you can turn left and go up park creek and over park creek pass down thunder creek to a colonial creek on near diablo lake or you can go south on the pct and go to mexico or you can go to stephens pass which is the next highway that you would cross okay whichever comes first yeah mexico or stephens pass they do have tacos at the ski area though okay the lodge there all right well great um geologically we are in one of the more complicated parts i think of the of the range there's just a lot going on right here so maybe i'm just thrown by the fact that the the gates closed but this does seem to be almost uh an under visited area like you're not there's no destination like you just drive like when the gates open in the summer why do people come up here is it just to drive up as far as they can and take pictures and go home yeah usually they come up here some people come up and have a nice picnic like we're doing today yes and a lot of other people will day hike up to the pass or continue from the pass up to the left on sahali arm oh okay which um is um probably one of the most spectacular viewpoints in the north cascades sahali arm sahali arm right up there at the point you just go up that gradual thing to the top yep it just keeps going and going and if you keep going you can get up to 8700 feet why is it spectacular up there compared to other places you got a trail that can take you up really high so for most people that's going to be the about the easiest place you can get to in the north cascades where you get that that kind of view and you look over the top you get higher than these peaks that we have here behind us oh and you're looking over the top of those oh down uh along the crest towards uh dome peak spire mountain buccandy glacier peak is very prominent on the horizon bonanza peak off to the east wow so it's a heck of a view sahali peak sahali arm and sahali peak at the top the peak's a bit of a more of a scramble but you can hike up hike up to 8 000 feet based on the arm you can get that view from from many places on the arm yep liz and i could do this yeah you should we drove she would love it parked here yeah and got ourselves oh that's a day hike yeah you do asgard pass in a day hike this will be a piece of cake all right transitioning now we're going to start talking to brady and thinking about this episode so brady we are selfishly wanting to be up here without a bunch of people and so the hope is we can get brady up here to film a pbs episode before they open the gate and so that might be later this month of april or maybe we have to wait till may but we would maybe feature some of this rock here so what do we got here this is an out a beautiful outcrop that we met we might feature or crop the road out or whatever what is this stuff gary uh this is nice metamorphic nice and this is part of uh it's an ortho nice okay elderado ortho ortho nice roughly 90 million years old okay so at least the nice part the ortho part might be much older but okay so the 90 million years old is the age of metamorphism we think or intrusion of the granite okay and the metamorphism happened after along with the gadget nice and everything else and we'll have to look into that yeah we'll have to look into that a little bit stacia or somebody yeah ask her yeah but okay so there's metamorphic rock here for small scale stuff brady and we haven't featured many metamorphic rocks i don't think not a lot like the green schist i guess but like we haven't we haven't yeah we haven't shown a nice well the but that didn't really look like this what did it look like what did the yellow aster nice it was it was kind of it was swirly okay light and dark so this is not more than a billion years old necessarily but there's a hell of a lot of this stuff this elderado yeah ortho nice is a big wad on the map it's it's right here we can get our hands on it we can get all sorts of angles brady and then we can do some scenic filming back off to the north where everything we see is elderado ortho pretty much everything on the north side of the river is ortho nice okay elderado ortho nice so elderado ortho nice i think the pitch is that this is handsome rock it's got foliations there's complicated textures inside of the metamorphic rock but the metamorphism came after the rock was originally something else a former life a protolith the rock that it used to be and ortho nices used to be granites so you take a big blob of salt and pepper granite and there's a story there about why the big blob of magma came up into this area and then the story that comes later is changing it to a metamorphic rock i'm personally more interested in the original blobs of magma than i am the metamorphism based on what i know about the tectonic stories that we think we know to this point so we'll have to decide how if brady you're more interested in the metamorphic story or maybe gary's wants to pitch the metamorphic story more than he wants to pitch the the original igneous thing but in my mind it's the igneous flare-ups of different generations here in washington that can be more easily plugged into a tectonic collision or one ocean plate diving beneath another or an ocean plate breaking after a collision and so on back to gary so there's not a minor amount of this ortho nice no it's a big it's a big chunk how would you do it how would you do it uh verbally first of all like is this the southern edge of the eldorado ortho nice right here i would say yeah we're kind of at the at the southern edge basically the river valley here yeah and we looked down the valley a moment ago and we could see eldorado peak yeah and so that's kind of the i don't know if i'd call it the centerpiece but it's the high point and a significant landmark so the blob is named after that it's kind of more on the maybe the western edge of the blob but still it encompasses a large number and several of the very high peaks in the area forbidden peak over to mount buckner uh to the east okay so it's got some real high some of the higher peaks in the cascades are made out of this stuff mostly in the national park all in the national all in the national park yeah but we can find something if we feel we need it well we can talk about some of the higher peaks being built out of this stuff it's very it's very resistant rock resistant rock yeah and straight creek fault i don't know a crystalline core like i don't know like we're we're uh there's a whole family of these high peaks made out of very hard rock and there's a reason that all these high peaks are showing up west of east of derrington this is the elevator going up this is the elevator going up we wouldn't see this so kind of we have a group very high peaks that are right kind of in this area from eldorado peak going east and then north there's a bunch of peaks that are over 9 000 feet and then there's a couple up near the canadian border also that tall but then you got to skip over these little guys that we see up here and then go kind of southeast to get to the next next batch of uh 9 000 foot mountains down um in the area of holden and then you got to skip all the way down to mount stewart after that yeah so why not before we go to the maps is it eldorado ortho nice over here over here is not eldorado ortho nice well we're here is uh cascade river schist and mount johannesburg is the uh poster child for the cascade river schist basically the whole thing from bottom to top is this uh schist that apparently um i mean it had a protolith that was probably local probably the um triassic uh marble mount dumbbell pluton which is not we don't find that here we find that further much further down the valley in this area and so it was this was all a chunk of uh oceanic arc rock sediments that didn't wound up getting squeezed together and formed into a schist that stuff's cool and you're right on the mark of course you've done your homework but i wonder if if one of the main storylines is we have uplifted basement in the north cascades that popped up 50 million years ago rocketed 20 miles below the surface rocket into the surface and it's not all the same stuff there's a part of the basement here's a part of the basement they're both metamorphic rocks they're both recording drama that happened more than 100 million years ago but it pops up 50 million years ago and we maybe look are there some differences are there some uh erosional differences you can't fly a drone but like you can't tell it's schist from here like i don't know like yeah you can't they're both hard yeah they're both this is harder this is hard i mean the interesting thing is this is harder than the schist and the peaks on behind us here are basically a thousand feet taller than the ones over here that are made out of schist okay so somewhat softer or varying rates of uplift whatever you want to go with i guess but the schist would be somewhat softer let's play with that a little bit like if if we have so that's not a jet right that's an avalanche up there we need a big one my god so there's not a huge erosional difference it'd be too much of a stretch to say look at all the this is slightly softer metamorphic rock look at all the spires and everything else there's not these sheer faces that you would have with nice it's just not still pretty sure pretty sure yeah i mean it's tough stuff yeah and and it's definitely been worked hard by ice that's the point so it's all around us we have hard metamorphic rocks and we don't have these peaks going all the way to the pacific ocean because we suddenly get out maybe we do make a point not far to the west of here is a sharp line on a geologic map and you just don't have these towering peaks of very hard metamorphic rock anymore you got mount shuksan which is kind of that's kind of significant landmark too okay is there anything ice age that you that that we want to draw out here as far as ice continental ice i don't i don't see what's the evidence for continental ice even being this far south on the on the crest of the cascades i would never dream the cat the ice the canadian ice sheet was here well it kind of filled all the valleys on the on the west side and and on the east side and was pouring over pouring over the crest so this was a spot where it poured over to the east and then there's other spots uh kind of on some passes to the east where it's maybe more clear where there's a striations crossing the passes and i believe there's some of that up here too okay that's something we can do so this is uh an eret that's been beveled over a beveled eret yes you can again we can't fly but like you could follow a jagged ridge and this is a glacial eret and there's been alpine ice carving on both sides and making this erasure sharp ridge this is the work of of alpine ice but did you know that in addition to alpine glaciers carving in valleys and making very jagged ridges there are places where the formerly jagged ridge has been beveled over scooped over smoothed over or you can see where the jagged ridge is gone why i don't know if it really is gone but it looks like it's gone not very jagged not very jagged it's pretty mellow compared to this could be an ice age show oh not again all right let's look at some maps you got a little stick for a pointer blade of grass i got some nice good better yet a nice pointer yeah so we're right right about there and the tan color here is the ortho nice and then the lighter color that with the tkcs is uh cascade river schist and mount johannesburg right above us here so where's the road that we walked up the road we walked up there's a thin red line there next to the yellow right above the yellow yeah and if we zoom out are there any landmarks we can see that that our general viewers would recognize any towns or any where's the park or where's uh yeah the national park is basically up here uh head of lake chelan oh yeah over here so here's this tahican river that winds its way up to the path so it's quite a quite a distance here right and see highway 20 is just up to the north here's diablo lake diablo dam ross dam just above here marble mounts just around the around the corner right over here good okay we're looking at the heart of the fruitcake well i want to point this out too though which is really cool this pink yeah here here here here and over here this is the cascade pass dyke named because of the granitic rock that goes right through cascade pass behind us where does it go specifically through uh well it kind of covers a it's kind of a swath here so that um let's see so it's kind of between the triplets which is underneath the right under the little cloud between there and mix up peak to the left so kind of on there's a big shelf up there yeah it's kind of right through there and it goes through right through the pass and the interesting thing about that is it's it's kind of weird because it's kind of a diagonal going right right through the heart of the range cross the crest and it's young way young way young it's a cascade volcanic arc feature so it's 18 million i believe so compared to everything else here it's it's a baby it's a young squirt coming right through it and that's why it makes such a you can follow that red worm pretty easily because it's so young it's one of the youngest contributions to the bedrock before the ice age starts bringing in a bunch of yellow where is it again the cascade dyke cascade pass dyke right through here look at that why and part of it's white because it's yeah is that a one-of-a-kind are there any more of those younger than 20 million year old dykes that cut through the bedrock like that well there's okay i boy i don't know that there is they go through it at an angle like that it's pretty pretty unique i think okay and the other thing is of interest too is that there's kind of all along right nearby it there is mining historic mining activity not anymore but um there are mines here the skagit queen up in the head of thunder creek nearby near not necessarily right over um this mining dish down below us here is going on on johannesburg with these huge trams that double diamond i think it was called the back side of johannesburg had a bunch of uh mineral claims i don't think i have the narrative yet that we might use what were you thinking we might do i think it was part of it is looking at just the spectacular scenery and you know what what's actually holding all this holding all these mountains up what's holding them up it's hard rock this hard metamorphic rock we don't have this in other parts of washington or oregon because this hard metamorphic rock is down 20 miles down this is a rare part of washington where the the metamorphic rock which is normally down in the dark has been lifted up to the sunlight and it's holding up every one of these peaks and then you hit schist schist schist all the way across the face here top to bottom i mean you can see some of the there's some i think that's actually vertical foliation that you can see it looks like scratches on there and i think that might be vertical foliation only because i know further to the west here there's some other spots where it's quite vertical yeah like i want to ignore the granite i know you like the but i want to ignore the granite and just say these are i can do that this whole scene is is we're in the north cascades but there's no granite there's no igneous rock essentially these are all mountain peaks made out of metamorphic rock that was originally igneous yeah mostly i mean we might do that like we made that point that the north cascades have been lifted so much compared to the south cascades where are the strata volcanoes we can't see one here this is the the sub-flooring the stuff that's beneath all the cascades to the south in washington that has been lifted up great yeah that we think it's down there that's been dramatically jacked up into the sky could you take us on a quick drive uh where are we on this map uh we're down kind of like probably in what they're that's what's the trs on here cascade river schist so we're kind of down in uh kind of down in the purple okay trm is marble mount course yeah so we're kind of right right about there so our video today has been south of marble mount kind of just immediately east of the straight creek fault where's the street creek fault on the street faults over here yeah and i think they're showing this one this is the inyat fault okay red line right through here yeah and the two meet kind of at the top of this drawing so the geology and the greens between i-5 and marble mount is so significantly different than the geology east of marble mount through north cascades national park at least to uh kind of washington pass area this part's completely unique than all the lighter green stuff is all metal ocean rocks and so in the video today we've been looking at metamorphic rocks that are representative of this of this uplifted crystalline core it's significant and you go over to the greens and that's more of a san juan islands stack of pizza boxes story cedro woolley concrete derrington burlington yeah nice we got them right there okay and the bell pass melange well we're kind of back to some major themes of this potential episode for the pbs show we're looking into the heart of the cascades we're looking into the heart of the north cascades and these are not volcanoes those are hard metamorphic rocks up there in the snow and it's rare to have mid crustal metamorphic rocks jacked up into the sky like that especially in a mountain range that most people think of as a chain of volcanoes so we had to have a lot of uplift here to get this to get this stuff exposed at the surface even the the top of those mountains were miles and miles under into the crust so gary i'm down at the cascade river itself gorgeous now i'm just slowly lifting out of the river valley there's a lot of trees a lot of trees they're covering up some pretty cool looking rocks and then now i'm on is there a name for that jagged most little guy way over to the right on the skyline up above yes the jagged little guy way on the right is a hidden lake peak and the lookout is located on the jagged little peak on the right there's a lookout up there yeah a very instagrammable lookout okay and to the left is hidden lake peak itself which is actually a little higher in elevation than the lookout and then we go left and we hit sibley pass and shortly after that we run into the blob which is the big green thing made out of the piqua schist and cascade river schist and then one more time and then we're a little bit further to the left we're into the headwaters of marble creek wow and we're looking at dorado needle under the under the cloud eldorado peak is just slightly hidden behind the blob unfortunately from here we'll have to have see what we can do about moving the blob for this sake of the viewpoint is that all snow is there some ice there's there's a little bit of ice left up there hard to see right at this time of year but kind of just to the left of the high point there there's a glacier and there used to be even back in the you know the 70s there's quite a bit more exposed ice and elevation up there is about 8400 feet elevation down here at the river is roughly might be under a thousand feet so we have a tremendous amount of elevation change between here and the top of the peak and this is reminiscent of scouting videos we did with the lahar chute from glacier peak volcano down to the tulip fields but that's like a couple drainages away from here yes to the south to the south yeah so no lahars came down barreling down this yeah we don't uh we don't yet have a cone up in the head of the cascade river anywhere i don't know it could happen i guess as long as we keep subducting maybe we'll get one it's not too late thank you gary thank you nick