[CALM MUSIC] {DAVID YETMAN} The Cascades split states in our northwest from north to south.

In Washington, the divide is noticeable On the west, are the Pacific Ocean and lush forests on the east, lie semi-arid hills and farmlands where irrigation is necessary.

The mountains are volcanic, some of them active.

People have founded communities with distinct personalities on both sides of the range.

[PEOPLE SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY] {ANNOUNCER} Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey.

[MUSIC] The Guilford Fund.

Arch and Laura Brown.

And Hugh and Joyce Bell.

[THEME SONG PLAYING] [SOFT MUSIC] {DAVID} Seattle is the major city in the northwestern part of the lower 48 United States.

It's an ideal location for shipping, sitting at the eastern end of Puget Sound, with its protected waters and the great shipping routes that it offers to the Pacific.

[SOFT MUSIC] The climate and the rainfall and the water the Seattle has are the responsibility of a mountain range.

Just to the east, the Cascades, one of the great mountain ranges of the Americas.

The Cascades have a violent past and a sensational present.

[SOFT MUSIC CONTINUES] The big story of the western part of the Cascades is volcanoes and snow, in the eastern part of the Cascades in North Cascades National Park, the story is ancient hard rock and glaciers.

Together, they make for America's perhaps most vibrant mountain range.

And in my opinion, the most interesting mountain range in the United States.

[MUSIC SPEEDS UP] {DAVID} Seattle is, is the the big city for all the northwest.

But the view of Mount Rainier and the history of the relationship to the whole rest of the region, that makes up for a very unusual context.

I don't know the origin of, the name Cascades, but in general, it's really appropriate for around here because, man, there's waterfalls everywhere.

[WATER SPLASHING] The Cascade Mountains and all rise simply from volcanic activity.

When the plates collided, there was a crumpling of the crust on the North American plate, raising the elevation of everything probably three or four thousand feet From there, the volcano exploded on top of that.

But the volcanic rock over the eons is softer than the granite rock.

And granite, under the influence of glacial action, forms cliffs and valleys.

And when the water has to go somewhere, it goes straight over the cliffs, with immense energy.

[WATER FALLING] [MUSIC] I'm lucky enough to have my grandson Naio with me as a guide.

He's - He knows this place back and forth, hes a mountain climber.

Hes a snowboarder.

He's a skier.

[PHOTO CLICKS] [UPLIFTING MUSIC] We're on a trail to a place called Artist Point where you get a view both of Mount Baker and Mount Shuksan Volcanic nature of the Cascades is responsible for this entire landscape.

And that's due to the peculiar movement of the Juan de Fuca plate subducting under the North American Plate, giving us the Cascades.

And I can't imagine a greater alpine landscape to what we're seeing.

[MUSIC ENDS] {NAIO} So there's the 50 tallest mountains in Washington.

They're called the Bulgars, I presume, because they kind of bulge out of the ground.

{DAVID} How many of those have you climb?

{NAIO} I've climbed all of them.

Yeah.

So I did them all in one season.

That was a busy time in the outdoors for me for sure {DAVID} And Mount Rainier is over 14,000.

{NAIO} Yep.

[LOW ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC] {NAIO} Yeah that's Baker Lake, which is pretty phenomenal.

Spot to go recreate as well.

[FOOTSTEPS] {DAVID} What look like natural lakes on the maps, even on the very wet part of the Cascades, are actually reservoirs or theyre river valleys that were dammed up for both hydroelectric and storage purposes.

{NAIO} So we're fairly close to the timberline right here.

The snow that we see right now are still the remains of the glaciers.

Every year they disintegrate more and more and they recede.

It's definitely a negative accumulation of snow and ice on them.

[CALM MUSIC PLAYING] [FOOTSTEPS] {DAVIS} As you go downhill in this part of the state of Washington, there's an unusual thing happening.

The Cascade Mountains going right down to the ocean.

[MUSIC] {DAVID} Bellingham Bay is one of the few places on the northwest coast of Washington where there was a safe harbor from storms.

And although settlers were coming from the eastern United States, they could not make their way over the Cascades.

They had no way to get around.

And so this area was not visited by Americans until long after the Revolutionary War.

The Great Cascade Range actually reaches to the edge of the ocean and its overall geological influence forms this bay.

So fishing and lumber cutting and later gold became the basis of the local economy.

In the late 18th century The British and the Americans, had a significant disagreement as to where the international border would be located.

Many American settlers demanded that it go up to 54 degrees north, which is well north of the Canadian border is now.

But, cooler heads prevailed and the 49th parallel was selected, which is only about 15 miles north of here.

Oddly enough, settlers came here by boat from the west coast.

Not from the East Coast, because they could not find a safe route for everyone across the Cascades.

And so the timber sources that were here, which were thought to be inexhaustible, and even some gold, made this a place where settlers poured in and began the city of Bellingham.

Early in the 19th century.

[UPLIFTING MUSIC] In northwest Washington, where the Cascades come down to the sea, there is not much flat land available for agriculture.

The early settlers got a homestead in here, 160 acres, and fed themselves and their families, and had a small amount to sell.

Nowadays, commercial agriculture is on the international market.

The climate here is perfect not just for cattle grazing, but for crops such as apples, berries, alfalfa and corn and others.

[MUSIC] A great deal of the economy of the northwestern U.S.

and the north coast of the state of Washington depends upon the harvesting timber [TRUNK ENGINE SOUNDS] The industry has a long record of controversy.

Basically old growth forest as opposed to new growth forest.

A great deal of the lumber of the United States comes from this area and from south western Canada.

So it's a vital role in the economy of this part of the country and to an extent, the whole country.

Lumbering has also a mystique.

in the history in the northwest.

And part of it goes back to the individual lumbermen.

Nowadays, most of it is done with big machinery, [TRUCK SOUNDS] large trucks, and more or less automated sawmills [TRUNK ENGINE SOUNDS] {DAVID} Once we get over the top, heading east, over the Cascade Divide, the forest changes.

If you look off in the distance, you can see there's no forest at all.

And that's Eastern Washington.

One noticeable difference here in the eastern part of Washington is the presence of the sprinkler systems.

They are inherent part of agriculture.

A lot of the water is pumped instead of available out of streams locally.

The land becomes even more arid.

And instead of trees, you see rolling plains with grasses on them.

That's the difference between eastern and western Washington.

It has its virtues here in the East, but it's quite different from that in the West.

{NAIO} It feels like 100 degrees out here.

It's much arid {DAVID} Feels like more like desert {NAIO} Yes, definitely reminds me much more of the desert climate that we're both kind of used to.

[LAUGHTER] {DAVID} Still in Washington {NAIO} Yeah, exactly.

{DAVID} It's a weird little town, Winthrop.

{NAIO} Yeah.

{DAVID} They've apparently adopted this Western theme liberally, but it's an old gold rush town.

{NAIO} Yeah, exactly.

And it seems like the population is pretty small and very much a tourist area.

It's interesting, though, that they do keep the Western theme going, but I like it.

It's, it's a cozy little town and lots of nice little shops.

{DAVID} Eastern Washington is as dry as western Washington is wet {NAIO} Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

And over on the peninsula, we have the Hoh rainforest, which gets a substantial amount of rain.

And then Mt.

Baker, where they get a lot of snow {DAVID} It gets really cold here and they get some snow.

{NAIO} Yeah definitely Washington pass So we just came over.

It closes in the winter for a good chunk of the time.

[SOFT BANJO MUSIC] {DAVID} there's only one highway that goes across the northern part of the Cascades.

And somewhere up here we know there's a lookout, but I've got to find it so we can get the big picture of how vast the North Cascades National Park is.

North Cascades National Park is unusual in the United States in that it has more glaciers than any other place in the lower 48 states.

The early explorers who came in here got this far even closer to the Pacific, but never made it through there.

There were fur trappers, and there were really no roads built across this until mid 20th century.

It was just too rough.

That barrier gave protection to what is now North Cascades National Park.

[ACOUSTIC GUITAR MUSIC] {DAVID} How's the hiking in North Cascades?

{NAIO} Oh, it's some of the best such diversity and just the landscape.

And when you get to the top, one of these mountains and you can see just peaks forever expanding.

{DAVID} I believe 83% of the park is wilderness, which means no mechanical, travel is permitted.

The nature of the forest here really changes.

We were just down on the east side of the Cascades, and this is a much, I would say, lusher forest and richer in species.

Although it's mostly clear today from a meteorological standpoint there's a lot of haze.

And this time of year, that's to be expected.

{NAIO} Yeah.

It seems like almost every year the North Cascades catches on fire in some area or another, and it's just really hard for them to kind of get contained and still start - until it starts raining.

{DAVID} The Park Service studies show that the vegetation in response to climate change, stuff's moving higher because it's warmer.

And so there's this compression for the animal and plant species that's occurring everywhere.

Now this is just a short walk from the parking lot to the overlook.

But the forest here it takes you through is pretty special.

{NAIO} Yeah, it's definitely a very apparent transition as basically, as you said, all the moisture kind of gets dropped on the west side and the east is left with just the remnants of that.

But yeah, they still get quite a bit of snow up here during the wintertime.

Basically, this mountain pass is closed for three to four months out of the year.

{DAVID} And, boy, this is the overlook, wow {NAIO} Yeah.

{DAVID} So we have a glacially sculpted valley here.

{NAIO} Yeah and you can see tiny little spots of snow up there.

{DAVID} You know, North Cascades National Park is fairly new, and they have, like, hundreds of the visitors that the more popular parks get But in terms of visual effect, it can match Yosemite.

For the grandeur.

{NAIO} It's very stunning and really interesting watching or looking at the different avalanche trails like this right here, where - {DAVID} Yeah, where you see the light color.

That means it's recent.

{NAIO} Yeah and it just mowed down all the trees and started to grow back a bit.

[UPLIFTING MUSIC] {DAVID} I have this peculiar fascination of mountains because they make all other landscapes come alive without the mountains there arent any flatlands.

The contrast is what sets them up.

For us without mountains.

There's very little water.

Without mountains, there's not a lot of the minerals that we value so much.

And without them, we do not have ways of escaping the heat and the lowlands.

They are, a part of Earth that I think enhance and expand the human spirit.

[UPLIFTING MUSIC] The mountains of this area are bisected by a deep canyon, which has been dammed many, many years ago to form a succession of finger wide lakes.

There is Ross Lake, which is very long, many, many miles long, and Diablo Lake, which we're looking here.

They have become part of a national recreation area and are popular with water sports.

{DAVID} Another mark of, northwest in general, particularly northwest Washington, is the thick forest.

And it changes, from the very high parts where you got this almost subalpine forest of, of conifers.

And then the lower you go you get, the more of the mixture, and below you get to maples and alders, mixed with the firs and the spruces and the cedars.

It's an ongoing adventure.

If you have any interest in how forests work to see the changes.

[MUSIC] This is great, Naio You brought me to old growth forest, which you can actually get to fairly easily.

My God... The size of these trees.

Good heavens, they must be 200ft tall.

{NAIO} It's really nice that at least some of the original forest was kept and preserved.

{DAVID} Now you can see why the lumbermen love the old growth.

One tree is enough to make 100 houses.

The access road to Baker Lake is only a couple hundred yards back.

{NAIO} Yeah, yeah, it's amazing how easily accessible this is.

{DAVID} But this is breathtakingly - a large canopy here.

And the other thing about this, old growth is the silence and the smell.

{NAIO} Yeah, it's really hard to just describe that fresh forest smell.

[MUSIC] Sometimes when I don't get out into the woods for a while and I get out of the car and just get that first breath of nice, fresh mountain air, it's - It's a wonderful feeling.

{DAVID} You got some happy dogs here.

{NAIO} Yeah.

No worries {DAVID} Hi babies {SUSAN} This was a real blessing for us to have this access to nature.

When we had, during the pandemic where everything was shut down and we were able to come here with our dogs and ourselves and get out in nature and really,just benefited so much from this.

[FOOTSTEPS] [MUSIC] {DAVID} A wonderful thing about old growth forest is that there is a ground, ground cover and ground story.

In Pine Forest you don't get as much because pines don't like competition from the ground up.

But here there's everything flourishes with everything else and evolved to do that.

{NAIO} Yeah, well, it's really neat to see in the kind of the cycle of life as the tree is falling over and you get this big root ball you can see the other plants and trees growing out of it.

Sometimes even the children of that same tree.

{DAVID} You know, this is a large tree, probably 200ft tall.

And you could build a whole block full of houses from one tree.

Yeah.

So that's roughly six feet.

And you can see it's bigger than that.

But can you imagine how long it takes for a tree like that to grow?

This old growth is home to a huge diversity of stuff.

And the problem with clear cutting, we need the lumber.

But once they, the lumbermen, cut everything down, they come back and planet with one species.

So here we have probably six species of large trees, 100 species of shrubs and tens of thousands of species of lower plants, fungi, bacteria, even small animals And those clear cut pastures, Once they're planted, you get one.

It looks like this tree fell down a long time ago.

{NAIO} Yeah, it's been a few years you can see its already starting to moss over and sorta Yeah, grow new material.

{DAVID} Well, it sorta got a little ecosystem growing out of it.

And there's no alarm ring going on here for I dont know, 150 years, so we're lucky to have this little pocket left.

{NAIO} It's nice that it was preserved and allows us to kind of see and experience reconnect with these big trees.

[SOFT MUSIC] {DAVID} Commercial lumbering practices have raised questions about unexpected consequences.

One example is a deadly landslide in the heart of timber country.

This landslide was only ten years ago.

and 43 people killed in it.

{NAIO} Was one of the most devastating landslides in America {DAVID} So it was an enormous hillside.

Just gave way.

{NAIO} To a bunch of loose sediment.

And after some super heavy rains, it just let loose.

And I think once it let go, it just kept on flowing.

Just a wall of mud.

{DAVID} Half a square a mile.

What a tragedy that people were building in there.

{NAIO} Yeah.

{DAVID} You can see here how Oh my gosh, that scar, how wide it actually is.

{NAIO} Yeah.

I mean, even from the distance from the road, you can pretty clearly see it.

And it it is starting to grow over.

There's a lot more vegetation now ten years later.

But yeah, I came through here a couple years after it happened, and it was very barren here.

{DAVID} It was still sterile.

{NAIO} Yeah, it was just Yeah, I don't think there's any warning, though.

No earthquake or cracks or anything else that would really have shown it.

{DAVID} So that's the heritage of the glacier?

{NAIO} Yeah.

{DAVID} This sort of conceals where it's been until some catastrophe reveals.

And that's a hard way from the revelation to occur.

[SENTIMENTAL MUSIC] {DAVID} We've got a crazy day tonight in the town of Leavenworth, Washington.

not Kansas, where the prison is, but this is in, in Washington.

It's a town completely dedicated to a bavarian theme, to German themes.

And we're supposedly arriving there in early September at what they call the September Fest.

{TOUR GUIDE} “Willkommen” is all I can say in German.

[LAUGHTER] {NAIO} Every store has to have some sort of Bavarian theme.

{DAVID} The difference between here and Winthrop, which has the western theme, is this is big and afluent That was sort of small and rural.

But it also is clear that this brought in a lot of people {NAIO} Yeah, definitely.

They really capitalize on their Christmas and Oktoberfest, tucked down here in the mountains, river right next to us.

And of course, everyone loves a good bratwurst.

{DAVID} You know, it's - it's weird but you can smell mustard in the air.

I wonder if they have, you know, our special machine that creates that wafting effect?

{NAIO} Yeah, I'm definitely smelling the bratwurst.

[HORSE WALKING] [BACKGROUND CONVERSATION] {NAIO} And of course, like any tourist town, you get all your little trinkets around here.

Nutcracker.

{DAVID} The bigger reality is that is still part of the overall cascade picture.

{NAIO} Yeah, it's still a bit of a drive, but makes you feel like you kind of get away from the city.

{DAVID} Bavaria is known to be located in the Black Forest, and so the location really suits that - That decision to make the the theme, because it fits right in geographically with a lot of Bavaria.

{NAIO} Yeah, it's nice to have a little town square here and it looks like they have a bit of an art walk right now.

{DAVID} Is it pretty cold here in wintertime?

{NAIO} Oh yeah.

Yeah, there's definitely snow here.

{DAVID} I'm generally cynical about tourist things but they have really done a nice job here.

{TOUR GUIDE} He's got a brother named Olav.

{WOMAN} No way!

[MUSIC] {DAVID} Little Naio, Cheers.

I did not think you would have me in the Cascades in a Biergarten ordering bratwurst.

{NAIO} Yeah.

In a Hofbräuhaus.

But, hey, it seems to work.

{NAIO} Not a bad way to end the trip {DAVID} Yeah.

You're a good grandson, by the way.

{NAIO} Yeah, you're a pretty good grandpa as well.

Thanks for the trip.

[MUSIC ENDS] {DAVID} Join us next time In the Americas, with me David Yetman {DAVID} The Mexican state of Oaxaca has a greater variety of cultures, habitats, and geographical features than any other area in the Americas.

In its deeply forested mountains, Native peoples have learned over the centuries to use their forest to sustain them and their economy in an enduring fashion.

We can learn from them.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] {DAVID} Slugs don't move real quickly, but as they move along They leave a trail of slime behind them.

They have a very important function.

They eat very small particles of, of vegetable matter, detritus along the way, and then they digest it and produce even more fertilized additions to the soil.

So they're not the sort of thing that is known for its, for their beauty and their artistic interest.

{ANNOUNCER} Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman Was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey.

The Guilford Fund.

Arch and Laura Brown.

And Hugh and Joyce Bell.