David Snyder

Recently, North Cascades hired photojournalist and Artist-in-Residence alumn David Snyder to help build our digital image library. The results are amazing and I'm thrilled to have access to so many high-quality photographs. It's crucial to communicating our parks' goals and mission to the general public.

David also wrote a very thoughtful blog post about his experience:
The park is spectacular. If you have never seen it - and most of you haven’t - go. You will not be disappointed if you have one spark of love in you for wild places. But the park has something else as well - a remarkable collection of people working there - people who love what they do, and whose job, day in and day out, is to protect a national treasure: the park itself. Two and half years now since returning from Africa to the US, the park offers something I haven’t found on the busy and crowded East Coast - a place where the people around you are actually happy to be where they are -where the people love their corner of the world. From what I’ve seen in the last two and half years, we don’t have that here in the East - we run from place to place. We hate our jobs, or at best tolerate them as a menas to an end. And we don’t even take the time, it seems, to recognize that in ourselves.

If ten days in the North Cascade wilderness teaches you much about the world around you, it gives you, most preciously, insight into how you live - detached, in most cases, from the wilderness from which we all emerged. I truly believe we’ve cut that strand to our past to our own detriment - and the chance to reconnect slips away with each road built and each tree cut. Get out to the North Cascades if you can. Get outside at all. It’s where we’re all meant to be.