Concrete is a company town that outlived its company. The silos still stand over Highway 20 as the landmark everyone navigates by, and much of the housing dates to the cement-plant decades of the early 1900s — sturdy little homes that have watched a century of upper Skagit weather come down the valley. Alpine Exteriors replaces windows in Concrete and the surrounding upriver communities, where the climate demands more from glass than it does at sea level.
Upriver Is a Different Climate
The drive east on Highway 20 crosses a real weather line. By the time you reach Concrete — near where the Baker River meets the Skagit, with Lake Shannon hanging in the hills above town — winters run colder than the lowlands, snow is an ordinary event rather than a novelty, and the shoulder seasons are long and wet. Windows here face genuine freeze-thaw cycling, weeks of near-freezing damp, and the occasional heavy snow year, all of which find every weakness in an old sash.
In company-era houses the weaknesses are plentiful. Original single-pane wood windows have had ninety-plus winters to loosen, and the storm windows that once defended them have mostly vanished or quit sealing. The result is what upriver residents know too well: frost feathers on the inside of the glass, heat bills that sting, and a stove or furnace that never gets to rest.