Crown Jewel Wilderness: Creating North Cascades National Park

North Cascades National Park is remote, rugged, and spectacularly majestic. Efforts to establish a park gained traction after World War II, as national interest in wilderness preservation and concerns about the impact of harvesting timber grew. Troubled by the National Park Service’s policy favoring development for tourism and the United States Forest Service’s policy promoting logging in the national forests, conservationists leveraged a changing political environment and the evolving environmental values of the natural resource agencies. Their activism eventually led to the 1968 creation of a crown jewel–Washington’s magnificent third national park. This engaging account tells the story.