North Cascades National Park is remote, rugged, and spectacularly majestic. Efforts to establish a park gained traction after World War II, as national interest in wilderness preservation and concerns about the impact of harvesting timber grew. Troubled by the National Park Service's policy favoring development for tourism and the United States Forest Service's policy promoting logging in the national forests, conservationists leveraged a changing political environment and the evolving environmental values of the natural resource agencies. Their activism eventually led to the 1968 creation of a crown jewel--Washington's magnificent third national park. This engaging account tells the story. Recommended by  High Country News , November 13, 2017, in "a sampling of the season's best new reads." "A tonic...offers timeless lessons in astute citizen activism. ...Danner never allows the dance of legislation to get dull." -- Joel Connelly, seattlepi.com "With clarity and insight, Danner tells a very complicated story of conservation politics. ...excellent." -- John Miles, National Parks Traveler "This is an uplifting story for our times. It is not only scholarly, it is inspiring." -- Mike McCloskey, former executive director, Sierra Club, and author of Conserving Oregon's Environment: Breakthroughs that Made History "Highly recommend for national park nerds, public land advocates, and historians alike." -- Sara Beth Davis, innercompassblog.com "Lauren Danner's engaging treatise on the North Cascades Mountain Range provides a window into the history of federal land management and its impact on the West in the twentieth century. ...A highly readable book." -- Lincoln Bramwell, PhD, Chief Historian, United States Forest Service "An engaging history of the movement to create North Cascades National Park... The story is not as well-known as it deserves to be." -- Chris Johnson, historian, National Park Service, Pacific West Regional Office, Seattle Lauren Danner, PhD, is a writer and historian based in Olympia, Washington. She focuses on public lands policy, Pacific Northwest and environmental history, and outdoor recreation. A former college professor, museum director, and Washington State field coordinator for the Lewis and Clark bicentennial, she now writes at laurendanner.com.