North Cascades has more glaciers than any other national park in the lower 48... and almost nobody goes.

This episode is about the strangest, most tangled national park in the country, and the question underneath all of it: when people have already rearranged a wild place, what do we owe it now?

We stand in Newhalem and feel Seattle's electricity humming in our teeth and visit three dams on the Skagit River that have been running since 1917 and still supply about 20% of the city's power. We explain the 1968 compromise that made this place a national park and a recreation area at the same time, which is why the road you drive in on isn't technically in the park at all. We tell the extremely weird story of J.D. Ross, the dam-builder who lit a waterfall in colored floodlights, hauled tropical plants indoors by hand every winter, ...