My North Cascades Story - Home in the North Cascades

By: Cynthia Wilkerson, WA Program Manager, The Wilderness Society

I feel incredibly fortunate to call the North Cascades home.

The landscape of the North Cascades called to me to return to the Northwest after being gone for several years. Trained as an ecologist and wildlife biologist, I consciously challenged myself by attending graduate school in Florida. This allowed me to learn to look across ecological systems for the underlying similarities and landscape-level connections that bond all of nature as well as the policy interface between humans and the natural world. Although I lived in sunny Florida and California for seven years, the mountains, rivers, and forests of the Northwest continued to beckon from afar. These landscapes serve as a memoryscape for deep friendships and soul-satisfying challenges and experiences during my late teens and early twenties.

Several summers were spent living in a tent in a very remote part of coastal British Columbia, conducting research and running a research station. I matured and grew into an adult while living, working, and playing in these northwest forests.

My husband is a native Washingtonian who spent much of his life living all around the world, but has always called the Northwest home. When we returned to Washington state for our wedding a few years ago, we both looked at each other and wondered aloud why weren't living here.

In a wonderful turn of events, it just so happened that my husband had sent me a job announcement the week before - Washington Program Manager for The Wilderness Society, out of the Seattle office. After driving all day from California, I woke up early and put together my application package and sent it in on Monday morning. By Tuesday I had a phone call and Thursday - two days before the wedding - I had an interview. We spent our honeymoon on Vancouver Island, in the North Cascades and eastern Oregon - camping, hiking, fishing, reading, and basking in the sun along the way. When I got back to California, I was offered the job. My husband got a job with the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife in Ellensburg two weeks later. With a huge network of friends and family in the Seattle area and a strong desire to live in the Cle Elum aream, we moved to Roslyn that Thanksgiving and have been there the past two years.

Now we have a seven month old baby boy, Leopold, and I couldn't imagine a better place to raise a child. The mountains, forests and rivers provide endless entertainment and wonder. My husband is in heaven working with deer and elk and getting his hunting fix every spring and fall. We've spent a lot of time exploring trails in and around the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. Esmerelda Basin and Ingalls Creek have been particularly memorable as have lovely meanderings along the Cle Elum River and kayaking at Cooper Lake.

I spend a lot of time travelling across the Cascades to and from work (in a vanpool) and pass the southern edge of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Addition and Wild Pratt River proposal. So even when I'm in the office all day, I still get to enjoy the visual beauty of the North Cascades.

The work at The Wilderness Society is incredibly challenging and satisfying. I feel grateful to be part of a team with such dedication, knowledge, experience, and vision and to be working to protect the wild places of Washington State, including my North Cascades home, for current and future generations.