Exploration was on the agenda today. We crossed to the south side of the Skagit River and drove the shoreline road up to the Sauk River, a tributary of the Skagit. We then drove up the Sauk until we got to a bridge where we crossed and then drove back down to near the confluence in Rockport. Just before pulling into town, we diverted onto the Rockport Cascade Road, again going east up the south shore of the Skagit to Marblemount, a town with few businesses and a very low speed limit.

In Marblemount, we turned away from the Skagit up another tributary, this one called the Cascade River. Peggy and I went part way up this road when we were camped nearby in June.

The Cascade River runs in an extremely narrow gorge with nearly vertical banks. The flow is mostly snowmelt running through massive prehistoric highly compressed ash deposits which gullies easily and volcanic basalt which doesn’t gully at all. There are many small waterfalls right along the first 8 or 10 miles of road. Near the end of the paving, we pulled into a state park called Marble Creek and were able to follow the challenging skinny gravel road down to the river’s edge. The small campground has some wonderful sites and pit toilets but I am surely too big of a coward to pull our 34 foot monster in there. However, the terrain is majestic, the river is gorgeous and it looks like a spectacular camping spot for the tent crowd.

Not far from here is one of our favorite picnic spots. There is a pullout next to the road where you can take your food out, sit on the National Forest barricade and see exceptional views of the Cascades Range on the horizon, impossibly steep forested mountains all around and the Cascade River hundreds of feet below at the bottom of the gorge. It is pretty nifty.

A few miles above the campground, the road continued but the paving didn’t. We tried it for a mile or two but the washboard road surface became so miserable that keeping the back end of the truck behind the front end became quite challenging, so we chickened out and turned around instead of having a senior moment and plunging to certain death.

There’s a few pictures. Click the link. https://photos.app.goo.gl/DPZnGNAdN2WTh1Gu8