Ross Lake Confidential

It was late afternoon on Oct. 12, 2023, when Chris Johnson spotted his nephew pulling up to the docks at Ross Lake Resort. The lake was as low as he had ever seen it, the result of a dry summer that was stretching into early October. But it was still fall in the North Cascades.  The leaves were turning, the nights were cold, and the mornings arrived with mist shrouding the peaks. Johnson’s nephew told him he and his friends had spent the day fishing up near Hozomeen, the fang-like peak that towers above Ross Lake with a summit in the United States and ridgelines in Canada.

“He and his buddies had found a suitcase in the lake,” Johnson explained. “It was a large case with buckles on three sides.” 

Intrigued by the wayward piece of luggage, the group dragged the suitcase to shore and opened it up. 

“They broke it open and found quarry rocks and plastic bags,” Johnson continued. “They looked in one bag and saw a human foot.” 

They left the grisly discovery on the shore of the remote lake. By the following morning, park rangers and Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office detectives were on the scene. A few months later, they announced that the body was a Canadian. No one offered any more details, just that the investigation was being handed over to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. 

“I have no updates to share publicly,” RCMP Staff Sgt. Kris Clark said when asked about the status of the investigation in early 2026. “The investigation remains active and ongoing.” 

In the absence of updates, theories have blossomed. 

Connections have been made to recent missing persons cases on both sides of the border. Others argue that the body was dumped a long time ago, preserved by the icy depths and exposed as climate change drives down Ross Lake’s reservoir levels. Some think that the body was dropped on the Canadian side of the lake while the northern access road was closed for repairs between 2021 and 2024. There are theories about ties to organized crime and the drug trade. But while some theories may seem outlandish, they’re just another chapter in Ross Lake’s long and sometimes shady history.

Bootlegging, biome warriors and a failed bombing 

The Skagit Valley was a travel corridor long before Ross Lake existed. Archaeologists have found evidence of occupation and trade dating back nearly 10,000 years. Indigenous nations from across the region have stories that date back even further. 

Fur traders, miners, loggers and surveyors followed through the late 19th century. When Washington state voted in prohibition in 1916, four years before the 18th Amendment passed and became federal law, it became a reliable route for bootleggers smuggling liquor down through Canada. 

Two years after that, in 1918, Seattle City Light was granted permits to build three dams on the Skagit River. The Gorge Dam came first. Construction was started in 1921 and finished three years later. It would eventually be replaced by a concrete dam, called the Gorge High Dam, in 1961.

The Diablo Dam came next. It was complete in 1930, forming the reservoir we now call Diablo Lake. But it the workers building these dams saw the bootleggers, they didn’t leave a record of it. 

The first Ross Dam went up in 1940. It was raised higher nine years later, forming what we now call Ross Lake. 

But the 24-mile-long reservoir was almost even bigger. Seattle City Light had signed a deal with British Columbia to raise the Ross Dam another 120 feet. Called the High Ross Treaty, the larger dam would have flooded another 5,000 acres of the North Cascades. 

In 1953, C.W. “Curley” Chittenden was sent to the Canadian end of the lake to supervise logging to prepare the land to be flooded. When he got there, he fell in love with the unique Upper Skagit ecosystem that blends coastal and interior forests. Chittenden was enamored with the groves of ancient firs and hemlocks mixed with towering ponderosa pines. His refusal to log the trees and subsequent advocacy is credited with helping launch the movement to protect the Upper Skagit. 

But it wasn’t just Chittenden. To the south, conservation groups rallied to try to save the ancient cedar groves in Big Beaver Valley, a remote drainage on the lake’s western shore that would have been drowned by the High Ross Dam. Activists on both sides of the border rallied against the project for years, even staging “paddle-in” protests in canoes and kayaks. It took decades, but in 1984, Seattle City Light agreed not to raise the dam for at least 80 years, an agreement that won’t expire until 2064.

It’s not clear what else might have been happening on the lake during those years since publicly available digital records from the National Park Service only go back to the 1980s. But by 1992, it was clear that authorities in Canada and the United States were worried about crime on Ross Lake. 

That September, the National Park Service, the RCMP and Customs and Border Protection launched Operation Lighting Creek III, their third “multi-agency operation to detect and intercept drugs crossing the border into the United States through the Hozomeen and Ross Lake areas.” No drugs were found, according to park service records, but the operation intercepted illegal weapons and stopped illicit border crossings, including one described as possible human smuggling. 

There were at least two more Operation Lightning Creeks in the years that followed. But it was five years later, when police thwarted a plan to bomb the New York City subway, that Ross Lake gained international attention. 

Around 5 p.m. on June 23, 1996, a tour boat spotted a young man waving frantically from shore. He was soaked and shivering, in the early stages of hypothermia. Another boat picked him up from the rugged East Bank trail and shuttled him south.

A pair of rangers met the boat. They learned the man was named Abu Mezer, and he told them he had hiked south from Canada with a friend named Jamal Abed. Rangers found Abed not long after, also hypothermic, 4 miles up the trail from where Mezer was found. The pair said they were just out hiking, but the rangers were skeptical. 

“They had no camping gear, and no vehicles were left at the trail head where they said they had entered the park,” a report of the incident explained. The more they dug, the more questions came up.

“(Our) investigation indicates that Abed was attempting to help Abu Mezer gain illegal entry into the United States from Canada,” the final ranger report said. 

Mezer was deported back to Canada. He tried to cross twice more, once through the Peace Arch and once on a Greyhound bus. After that last time, Canada refused to take him back. Mezer claimed asylum and moved to New York City, where, on July 31, 1997, he was shot and arrested by New York Police Department officers. The police found pipe bombs in his apartment, and Mezer confessed to plotting a terrorist attack on the New York subway. Even though Ross Lake wasn’t how Mezer actually gained entry to the United States, its role in his story became a focus for the media and lawmakers.

By snow, by lake or by sky 

Ross Lake makes sense as a smuggling corridor. It is one of the only easy ways to cross a stretch of the U.S.-Canada border that legendary climber and mapmaker Fred Beckey once described moving through as “a full-on beat out bushwhack, that will make a grown man whimper and weep.” 

Especially in the dead of winter. 

In February 2000, two Canadians used stolen snowmobiles to drag a flat-bottomed johnboat down 25 miles of snow-covered roads between Hope, B.C., and Ross Lake. Once they reached the lake, they motored another 20 miles south and, according to park records, “cached $50,000 worth of high-grade ‘B.C. Bud’ marijuana.”

Park rangers and Whatcom County sheriff’s deputies stopped their boat as they tried to return north. According to park service records, they found “sophisticated radio/scanners, a GPS unit, and quality backcountry gear,” along with two life jackets with the words NPS Park Ranger stencilled on them. 

The men were “part of a criminal organization that was attempting to establish a pipeline to smuggle large quantities of marijuana through the park,” according to the investigation records. 

“Ross Lake is an established smuggling route, with movement of drugs, money, and aliens occurring by foot, bicycle, kayak, powerboat, and now snowmobile,” the report added. 

Later that year, park rangers “uncovered the smuggling routes of a crime syndicate while investigating reports from park staff of unusual helicopter activity over remote areas of the park.” A cross-border investigation discovered rented helicopters were being used to “fly ‘B.C. Bud’ marijuana into the U.S., and firearms, cocaine and currency into Canada.” 

Ross Lake was a main travel route, but the investigation found that “helicopters flew low-level through the park’s river valleys and passes, with the smugglers utilizing remote forest clearings to transfer loads to and from motor vehicles … on occasion, the pilots temporarily cached loads on alpine peaks in the park.” 

Sam Waddington, a longtime North Cascade climber and the owner of Mount Waddington Outdoors in Chilliwack, B.C., remembers hearing stories about these operations while growing up. He even recalls a climbing trip in the early 2000s when he watched from a ridgeline in the Skagit Valley as a helicopter tore past him and disappeared over Ross Lake.

“They actually ended up being caught,” he said, referring to another cross-border operation named Frozen Timber, which busted a helicopter drug-smuggling operation in 2006.

They legalize(d) it 

In the summer of 2008, a National Park Service helicopter pilot noticed a strange section of forest near the shores of Ross Lake. Trees were cut, the land had been terraced, and it looked like creeks had been diverted to feed an irrigation system. From the air, it looked like a small farm cut into the backcountry. 

It turned out to be a marijuana grow op. On Aug. 14, 2008, more than 50 officers from nine law enforcement agencies raided the site, burning more than 16,000 plants worth an estimated $48 million. They discovered living quarters, makeshift outhouses, more than 1,000 pounds of trash, and evidence that the operation had been trapping and harassing wildlife. 

“The appearance, location, and techniques used at the site are consistent with Mexican drug trafficking organizations that have been cultivating marijuana at several National Park Service sites in California in recent years,” a park service news release explained. 

The success of border interdiction,the release added, was forcing criminal organizations to look for grow op locations within the United States and that “the remote character of public lands, such as national parks, can prove attractive to such operations.” 

Records of drugs and smuggling through Ross Lake slowed down after the grow op was busted in 2008. It’s not clear if that represents an actual downturn or just a change in reporting, but some suggest that the decline might be due to cannabis legalization on both sides of the border.

Recreational cannabis use was legalized across Canada in 2018 following the passage of the “Cannabis Act,” and legalized in Washington state in 2012 after Initiative 502 passed in a general election.

“We are seeing fewer incidents of individuals crossing with illegal marijuana,” Sgt.said Tammy Lobb, a federal policing public information officer with the RCMP. “However, we don’t have any data to support whether legalization is a factor in that reduction.” 

But fewer incidents aren’t none. 

On Dec. 27, 2024, a man was arrested walking along the side of the North Cascades Highway. He had hiked south from Canada with a headlamp and a backpack. Along the way, he commandeered a National Park Service canoe and paddled the rest of the way to Ross Dam. When border officials searched his backpack, they found “almost 1.5 pounds of a purple crystallized substance” that, after testing, turned out to be about 13,000 doses of MDMA, also known as molly and ecstasy.

A few online comments tried to link that arrest with the body in the suitcase, but no one in law enforcement has suggested a connection. The only thread that links them is Ross Lake itself. And until the RCMP is ready to share more about their investigation, people will have to wonder about the truth and what other secrets might linger beneath the Ross Lake’s placid seeming surface.     X