My North Cascades Story - The Wonder of it All

By: Captain Dave Button, Pacific NW Float Trips

For me, winter time in the North Cascades always stirs up memories of my boyhood days spent along the Skagit River, Gorge Dam and Gorge Lake - a wonderland for any boy. My family moved to Diablo when I was eight months old and my adventures began. From the moment I could walk and talk, I was delivering newspapers from the back of one of my Dad's hunting mules. I played little league baseball and was a Boy Scout, though in daydreams I was Davey Crockett, holed-up in an Alamo in the Cascade Mountains. I even bought my first bicycle with my earnings on a trap line up Newhalem Creek and Pyramid Lake.

When I was in the sixth grade we moved to Newhalem. My world began to expand as I hiked into highland lakes and fished the many streams that cascade down from the rugged mountains.

My world continued to expand as I left Newhalem for college at Western Washington University and later the Army, where I was stationed in Arizona and Alaska.

Yet, just as the spawning salmon are drawn back to their birthplace, I too was drawn back to mine. I returned to Newhalem to teach the 4th, 5th, and 6th grades. My students and I especially enjoyed taking field trips on an old school bus to Winthrop over the North Cascades Highway, to Sedro-Woolley for after-school sports, to Ruby Creek where we floated inner tubes into Ross Lake and to Goodell Creek, where we floated into the Skagit.

Summers off allowed me to become an entrepreneur and I started Pacific NW Float Trips in 1974. Teaching in Newhalem, Sedro-Woolley and Darrington during the school year, I ran white-water rafting adventures during the summer months on the Skagit, Sauk, Suiattle, Nooksack, Wenatchee, Methow, Stilliguamish and Skykomish rivers. And in 1978, I began offering Bald Eagle rafting trips down the Skagit during the winter months.

I continue to realize the quest for adventure of my youth. Every day I spend guiding rafts, I bring visitors into my world of intrigue, riding the crest of the mysterious Skagit River.