It's a warm, sunny day in late April, and Marblemount's Jeff Muse is telling me about the epiphany he had during his senior year at a small college in Indiana.

We're on the shores of Diablo Lake, that jade-colored mini-ocean at the foot of a forested hillside that rises to an icy-topped North Cascades peak over a mile high. From the Highway 20 overlook at Milepost 132, this place drops jaws by the dozens.

"I read 'Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout' by Gary Snyder, and that changed everything for me," says Muse, an earnest 35-year-old. "His 'hands-on' view of the world in places like the Cascades and the Sierras inspired me and validated the kind of person I wanted to be."

Muse's raison d'etre became environmental education. Upon graduation, he started working with the Sedro-Woolley-based North Cascades Institute, through which he eventually met and worked with the noted poet. And these days, in an almost bizarrely coincidental turn of fate, Muse finds himself working at the very foot of that same Sourdough Mountain. He's director of the North Cascades Institute's brand-spanking-new, $11.6 million Environmental Learning Center.

"I feel really, really lucky," Muse says.

Nestled among cedars and fern-draped maples at the site of the old Diablo Lake Resort, the 16-building complex includes classrooms, a library, dining hall, amphitheater and lodging for participants in the institute's seminars and retreats. (It's also the former site of the camp used in the 1930s by construction workers who built nearby Ross Dam.) While a good many of the nonprofit outdoor-education group's seminars and retreats will continue to involve car camping, backpacking or overnight stays at places such as the Flick Creek House in Stehekin, the learning center gives them somewhat of a base camp in the heart of the North Cascades. It's perfect because the rugged range's peaks, forests, rivers and lakes — as well as their inhabitants — are pretty much the institute's classroom, anyway.

"The center is a way to open up to a whole new audience," says Lee Whitford, the institute's outreach coordinator. "A lot of people don't like camping in the rain, and this gives us a destination. We now have a physical space where we can help build a community of naturalists."

Many faithful already are in the fold. Bremerton teacher Patti Green, 48, takes three or four NCI classes or retreats each year, many focused on sketching, watercolor painting and writing.

"The teachers there are so great," Green says. "Whatever they teach you, they don't just give you a handout, they actually have you do what it is they're showing you."

This summer, Green has enrolled in a five-day Diablo Creative Arts Retreat, to be conducted at the learning center. Pastels, watercolor and block prints are on the retreat's agenda, which is open to artists of all levels.

"But there's always much more to these courses than just the art," she says. "It's about being able to go canoeing and birding, too, or just enjoy some quiet time journaling — it's the whole thing."

"A village feel"

On a hardhat tour of the yet-to-be-completed learning center with Whitford, Muse and David Hall, the learning center's chief architect, we wind around and through the wooded five-acre campus. We poke our heads in the cafeteria, classrooms, library and dormitory-style lodging, stepping over power cords and around saw horses, and trying like heck to keep from bumping into workers in tool belts.

When open, the learning center will sleep 46 and feed up to 80. Higher up the hill is housing for 14 graduate students; through Bellingham's Western Washington University, North Cascades Institute offers a masters program in environmental education and nonprofit administration.

Our tour follows connecting gravel pathways; there's no pavement anywhere. All of the learning center's buildings were constructed with sustainable, low-maintenance materials and designed to use as little energy as possible. Lots of glass means lots of natural lighting and reduced energy consumption. Composting will be a priority. Some 22,000 native plants were removed during construction, all of which will be replanted on site over the next six months.

"We'll be looking for lots of volunteers," Muse chuckles. "We're calling it Plantapalooza."

Overhead, wood beams and rooflines of adjacent classrooms overlap like hanging branches on a cedar tree.

"The idea is a Native American longhouse that's been pulled apart," Hall explains. "We wanted to keep the buildings close together to give it a village feel."

A lakeside village deep in the heart of the North Cascades. Sourdough Mountain's craggy shoulders poke through trees almost directly overhead. To the south, high across Diablo Lake, Colonial and Pyramid peaks rise high, striking a picture-postcard tableau. It's hard to imagine a more perfect setting for learning about the outdoors.

"This is an amazing place," says Hall, who works for Mount Vernon's Henry Klein Partnership, which designed the project. "I'll never have a setting like this to work in again."

Long time coming

The center has been a long time in coming. As part of a 1991 relicensing agreement for its three dams on the upper Skagit River — Ross, Diablo and Gorge — Seattle City Light was required to build a learning center for North Cascades National Park. Planning, including finding a site, took time. (The park's visitor center in Newhalem was considered for a while.) In 2000, the design was finally completed; building began in early 2002.

The massive October 2003 rockslide just outside Newhalem, which closed Highway 20 for months, delayed completion — even today the highway narrows to a single lane there — as did having to replace the original construction company partway through. Bellingham's Dawson Construction was brought in to finish the job, which is scheduled to be completed for the learning center to host its first retreat in early July.

Because the national park and North Cascades Institute are closely allied — they share office space, and park researchers often showcase their research through institute seminars and conferences — the institute will operate and maintain the learning center.

As exciting as the new learning center is, NCI executive director Saul Weisberg says it's just one aspect contributing to the group's mission.

"Ultimately, we're best at putting people in intimate contact with nature, so what we do outside of the building is a lot more important that what we'll do inside."

Mike McQuaide is a Bellingham freelance writer and author of guidebooks including "Day Hike! Central Cascades," published this month by Sasquatch Books. He can be reached at mikemcquaide@comcast.net.