Northern Cascades National Park

The purpose of this paper is to give you some background information

on Northern Cascades National Park and to talk about the management

techniques the park uses to preserve it. Northern Cascades National

Park became a national park on Oct 2, 1968, when Lyndon Johnson sighed

the North Cascades Act. Twenty years later congress designated 93% of

the park as a Stephen Mater Wilderness. When congress declares an area

as "wilderness," it provides extra protection against human impact.

Northern Cascades National Park is mostly used for backpackers and

mountain climbers, who have little impact on the park. There is one

gravel road open to the public that is in the park, but very few people

utilize it. Each year Northern Cascades National Park receives about

400,000 visitors for recreational purposes. Native Americans were

amongst the first to use this area. Four Indian tribes inhabited the

Cascades; the Upper Skagits, Sauk, Suiattle, and Swinomish who were

attracted to this area for its plentiful resources. By the 1770's

there was Euro American presence in the Cascades. The Euro Americans

used this area to get furs and pelts for trading. The beaver, wolf,

and grizzly bear were the most sought after pelts in the cascades, do

to their abundance. Later many would come to mine the cascades, but

there wasn't much of what they were looking for.

Northern Cascades National Park is about 684,000 acres and

encompasses Ross Lake and Lake Chelan National Recreation Area. In

today's society there are very few wilderness areas that aren't

impacted by human activity like Northern Cascades National Park. Many

areas within the park have had little human intervention. In many

areas of the park the only human impact is coming form air and water

pollution, which doesn't sound good. But this is still a lot less

impact than other parks receive. The Cascades stretch as far south as

California and continues north to British Columbia. The cascade

mountain range didn't used to be part of North America, but millions of

years ago it attached itself do to accumulation of sediment, colliding

tectonic plates, and volcanic activity

(www.north.cascades.national-park.com/info.htm). The Cascades is one

of the youngest mountain ranges in the world and one of the fasting

growing.

Depending where you are in the park the climate can dramatically

change. From the hundreds of small lakes and rivers that sculpt the

lowlands to the mountain tops that reach up to 1000

feet(www.north.cascades.national-park.com/info.htm). Within these

dramatic climate changes comes many different species. The lowlands

are thick with shrubs like the spiny devil and the prickly current and

tall trees like the hemlock and red cider. Many of the rivers and

lakes are inhabited with rainbow and cutthroat trout, which were

introduced many years ago. Most of the water in the park is surrounded

by marshes that provide habitat for many insects like mayflies and

nymphs. The mountaintops aren't as lush with species as the lowlands,

but you still can find lichens, a few insects, and two rosy finches.

Glaciers are another this which makes up a big park of the Northern

Cascades National Park. There are about 700 glaciers, which make up a

big part of the Cascades Mountain range. In the Park there are about

318 glaciers, which makes up 60% of the glaciers in the US. These 318

glaciers provide 21 billion cubic feet of water to nearby streams and

lakes (www.nps.gov/noca/mgt.htm).

One of the ways that the park's biologist decide how the should manage

the park is by monitoring different things. In 2001 biologists

conducted a two-year songbird inventory. The purpose of taking this

inventory was to find out how the birds utilize different habitat

within the park. By obtaining this information it can help the

songbirds population, in and outside the park. With this information

the biologists are able to see how to management plans