This is a winter scene on Cowboy Ridge at the summit of Stevens Pass, a popular winter-sports resort on U.S. Route 2 that features in Northwest Heritage Resources' Heritage Tour Guide number 8, 'Cascade Loop Tour – South'
The list of currently available guides is as follows:
● Tour 2, Leavenworth to Maryhill
● Tour 3, Richland to Clarkston
● Tour 4, Olympic Peninsula Loop)
● Tour 5, Seattle to Vancouver, Washington
● Tour 6, Seattle to Blaine
● Tour 7, Seattle to Spokane
● Tour 8, Cascade Loop – South
If there is a criticism to make of the latest guide, Cascade Loop Heritage Tour – South, it is that although Northwest Heritage Resources has had plenty of high-quality digital color photographs available to it, the photographs in the guide are printed entirely in a fairly dull gray-blue and white. (The text of the guide is a readable black.)
It is likely, however, that given the costs associated with producing the CDs, Northwest Heritage Resources decided to print the guide’s photographs in monocolor in order to help keep the price of the guide down to an affordable $17.95. Four of the other six guides are also priced at $17.95, though the earliest two still available (guides two and three) are priced at $12.
This is a view of Mount Stuart, taken during a hike high in the Cascade Mountains. This and many other maountains can be seen on the southern part of the Cascade Loop tour on U.S. Route 2
Northwest Heritage Resources has made it easy to purchase the guides not only through the organization itself, from which they can be ordered by phone, e-mail or mail for the listed price – or for an unspecified discount, if a shop wants to place a bulk order – plus $2.85 packaging and shipping, but also through its online distributor CDBaby.
This online distributor offers the audio guides not only as CDs plus the printed guidebook, but also as downloadable MP3 files priced at $0.99 per track or, for an MP3 of the whole album, at a slight discount to the CD-plus-guide price. (For instance, CDBaby is selling the downloadable MP3 file of the entire audio track accompanying the latest guide at $15.)
The best way to obtain more information about the guides, and to go about buying any in which you are interested, is to visit Northwest Heritage Resources’ main website, www.northwestheritageresources.org, or its dedicated site for the tour guides, www.washingtonfolkarts.com.
The latter site provides links to pages that describe each guide individually and offer a sample audio clip from one of the guide’s CDs. If you click on the hyperlink ‘How to order copies of the Heritage Tours’, the site takes you to a central purchasing page, which in turn provides direct links to the CDBaby online distributor’s ordering pages.
The Edelweiss Tanz Gruppe performs traditional Bavarian dances at festivals and events in Leavenworth, Washington
Although buying the entire series of guides would be a fairly expensive undertaking, if you’re visiting Washington State and want to take a driving tour (say, along the Cascade Loop on U.S. Route 2), it would be very well worth checking out if Northwest Heritage Resources has a Heritage Tour guide taking in the part of the state in which you’re traveling.
If it does, then we would recommend you buy the guide, because each guide offers so much in the way of local insight and information you wouldn’t find elsewhere. Alternatively, look at the guide list first and then decide on which tour you’d like to drive, and then buy the guide. Each of the guides, with its accompanying CDs, is a valuable resource for tourists and Washington State residents alike.
Tour Guide: Cascade Loop Heritage Tour – South
ISBN-10: 1-891466-08-9 (CD)
ISBN-13: 978-1-891466-08-3
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