Beautifully Slipping Away

Over Three Decades After Closure, The Fading Remains Tell Of A Campground Lost

The once high and dry Nooksack campground becomes the river once again. Remains of the flat plain of campsites can be seen upper right. Stripped of their limbs, mighty old-growth trees that once stood tall and healthy less than a decade ago, succumb to the river’s fascinating and inevitable cycle.

It is hard to convey just how much the slithering rush of the Nooksack River has taken from what once was, but I will try. Even thirty years ago, during my first visit to this particular site in the early 1990s, much had already disappeared.

Like the other campgrounds up Whatcom County’s Nooksack valley — Douglas Fir, Excelsior, and Silver Fir — the former Nooksack Campground likely had similar beginnings, but information regarding its background is scant. Mt-Baker.com, a local information site, mentions that the Civil Conservation Corps (CCC) started in 1933 building roads, lookouts, trails, and campgrounds in the vicinity of the Mt. Baker Highway, but it did not state whether or not the Nooksack Campground was one of those CCC projects. According to the Forest Archeologist for the Forest Service, while the Nooksack Campground is shown to exist on a 1931 forest map before CCC activity, there is nothing to suggest whether or not the CCC ever rebuilt the existing, older campground as was a common practice.

CCC or not, the campground could have also been rebuilt during Operation Outdoors, the National Forest Service Initiative set in motion nationwide in 1957, that swept away the rustic, hand-crafted features of the CCC-era outdoor recreation sites with the optimistic broom of modernism and its modern, manufactured materials. As a result, any hand-crafted rock fire pits, camp stoves, and other rustic features, if they were indeed added by the CCC, would all have been removed by the mid-1960s. In the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest region, CCC-built picnic shelters usually remained even after other CCC elements were replaced, but the Forest Service’s Mt. Baker Highway Corridor Manager did not recall the Nooksack Campground ever having one of those rustic rock shelters.

While the camp’s past lies in partial mystery, its closure does not. Regarding the camp’s demise, the Mt. Baker Highway Corridor Manager went on to say that after the consolidation of the ranger districts in 1984, there was “a high water/flood event” one or two years later that took out several campsites, closing the campground forever. Some time afterward, the rest of the infrastructure was removed by the Forest Service, but I am unsure if this was immediate or many years later. Whenever it was, it was not long after I moved to Whatcom County that I noticed this intriguing place no longer listed on current maps.

I had, for several years, driven past the old campground’s mysterious blocked entrance road on the Mt. Baker Highway and it kept whispering to me something I could only barely detect. Just where did that dead-end road go? Finally, my curiosity got the best of me one day when I pulled off the highway to check it out. Back then one could drive down the nicely paved entrance road about thousand feet or more to what was left of the old campground, before parking at a blockade of about three or four large boulders. From there it was a short walk on the road beyond to a paved intersection crumbling into the river, heavily covered in Western Hemlock needles and encroaching moss near the sides. This was when I realized it had been a campground.

The one-way loop road, still intact and walkable at that time, headed off to the right to access the overgrown campsites. Huge Douglas fir and maple trees loomed over this spot — it must have been a beautiful campground. At the confluence point of the entrance and exit of this loop road, there stood in tall grass and cheerful daisies, one of those abandoned, classic Forest Service information boards empty of any notices, only rusty staples remaining.

While much of the history of this site was buried deeply in both forgotten state archives and the memories of park rangers long since retired, the physical evidence of why it closed was striking in person. What was once the middle of the campground intersection dropped off abruptly into the churning river, twelve feet below. Here, the several inches of the old asphalt I was standing on could be seen and below that, down to the water, a millennium of glacial sediment and gravel. A few feet down the cliff, a severed, rusty water pipe stuck out comically three feet from the unstable cliff at a sagging angle and heading, I assumed, to the phantom of a nearby water spigot stolen by the river years before. The Nooksack River was aggressively grinding away at its namesake campground, the impermanence of human creations laid bare.

There likely was more to the campground but those sections were gone by the time of my initial investigation. However, I did recently find on the camping information site, thedyrt.com, a forest map showing clear evidence of an additional loop road to the left of the vanishing intersection that could have been a group camp but I am left with only guesses at this time. Today, where that smaller loop road existed, is now only breezy airspace just above the wide, graveled expanse of the river.

On the inside of a curve on SR 542, the Nooksack Campground’s main entrance leaves the Mt. Baker Highway and enters oblivion. Shortly after the closure, this entrance road was a much longer drive down to the river’s edge but now, due to the voracious river bend, ends only 100 feet from the highway.

Since that visit in the early-1990s, I’ve returned every few years to check in on the old campground and its river, and every time there are fewer traces to see. Even the barricades keep getting moved back, closer to the highway. Since most of my reference points have vanished as the landscape has drastically changed over the years, it is disorienting as I try to reconcile the past with the present. Two decades ago, the gravel campsites had been so consumed by the forest I could no longer ascertain where they were, and the graveled loop road, once a well-maintained lane in its hey-day, is now so thick with young trees it is difficult to follow. But, the most profound change to witness is what the river takes each year, as it swiftly erodes, day and night, the campground and the primeval forest floor growing on what was likely one of the river’s many ancient channels. Many of the massive, healthy Douglas Firs noted earlier now lay on their sides in the river. The entire paved intersection and its rusty pipe are gone, and with them, the information board among the daisies. Ancient stumps poke up out of the embankment below, and their brethren logs, buried horizontally by the river or landslides many centuries ago, now stick out eight or more feet from the pebbled cliff near the river’s edge below. As it both erases and reveals, the snaking river inexorably chews away at the next chapter in this valley’s inevitable cycle.

Over the next few decades, the Nooksack River, with the help of other forces of nature, may completely erase from the record any signs of the Nooksack Campground, including good portions of the ancient forest that surrounds it. Or, being the fickle agent of change that all rivers are, it may suddenly decide to head back to the other side of the valley to nibble away at a different forest, leaving what traces there are to see for another generation.

If you do journey out SR 542 to say farewell, stop at the old entrance right after milepost 38. At the time of this writing, the entrance road is still there terminating at a cliff now twenty-feet high, and there are more of the beautiful, giant Douglas Firs to see, clinging to their tentative existence as they teeter at the windy edge. While you are at it, the last horseshoe section of the old graveled loop road, though thickly forested, still sits to the west waiting for your eyes and feet if you dare, cut off from the world as it is by a twelve-foot drop to the gravel bar below. I recommend getting out to explore the place. It is only a matter of time before what is left of the campground, and it’s ghosts of campers and their smoldering campfires, disappear forever into the mists time.