We wanted to take advantage of some nice weather today to return to the North Cascades National Park.  They will be closing parts of the Cascade Highway as the snow comes in, so we wanted to get to a couple of places before that happens.

Our first stop was a Bald Eagle Natural Area.  This area is supposed to be the winter spot for a large Bald Eagle population due to the spawning salmon.  We did not see any at this spot, but they said the numbers don’t really pick up until December.  However, there were a couple of places along our drive to the park that we were able to see some bald eagles.

One perched in the tree

Further up the road we saw a group of them hanging out in the creek.  We pulled over and got out, but they are super skittish and some flew away.

We continued our drive into the park.  The beautiful weather allowed for views that we did not get the last time we were there.

Diablo Lake

We pulled into an overlook to enjoy the view while we had our lunch and then continued up the road to see if the road was closed at all.  There was an easy hike that I wanted to do that would take us to Rainy Lake.

As the altitude increased, we began to see snow!  It was beautiful.  It made Scott nervous because there were some bad spots on the road.

We finally made it to our trail head.  We had to bundle up a bit for the hike because we couldn’t make it to the parking lot with the car and it looked like we would have to go through quite a bit of snow.  YAY!

This was the road that you would normally drive down to the parking lot.

Here is the trail that we headed down.  There was easily 8 inches of snow for most of the way.  Some places had as much as 12 inches.

1 mile in we made it to Rainy Lake!  It was frozen over.  It was beautiful.  While we were enjoying the view, we heard what sounded like a herd of animals running towards us.  Turns out, snow makes a lot of noise when huge clumps are falling through the trees!

These pics were on our way out.

Walking through such thick snow for two miles was quite the workout.  But it was fun and totally worth it.  So glad I was prepared with our hats and gloves!  Also glad that we were able to see this before the road to it is closed for the winter.