Chelan

Nothing about the approach to Chelan prepares you for the lake itself. We drove in through dry, rolling hills studded with sagebrush and irrigation pivots, the kind of landscape that makes you doubt there’s a drop of water for a hundred miles — and then the road crests a rise and Lake Chelan appears, an impossible ribbon of turquoise carved by glaciers into a fjord-like trench over 1,400 feet deep. Lia actually pulled over. We sat on the hood of the car for ten minutes just looking at it before continuing down into town.

The town and the lake

Downtown Chelan hugs the southern tip of the lake, a small grid of ice cream shops, wine-tasting rooms, and beach parks that fills up fast with Seattleites escaping westside rain. We rented paddleboards from a shop on the waterfront and spent a morning drifting over water so clear we could count stones twenty feet down, cold enough from snowmelt to make you gasp on first contact even in August heat. In the afternoon, we found a spot on the public beach where kids cannonballed off a dock and orchard-scented wind rolled down off the hills — apple and cherry country stretches for miles above the shoreline, and roadside stands sell fruit so fresh it barely survives the drive home.

Stehekin and the lake’s wild end

The real adventure is at the far end of the lake, reachable only by boat or floatplane: Stehekin, a roadless village of about seventy people tucked against the North Cascades wilderness. We caught the Lady of the Lake ferry for the four-hour run up the length of the lake, watching the shoreline change from dry ranchland to dense alpine forest as the mountains closed in. In Stehekin we rented bikes, hiked to Rainbow Falls, and ate warm cinnamon rolls at the valley’s famous bakery, feeling, for one afternoon, thoroughly cut off from cell service and the rest of the world.

Getting There

Chelan is about a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Seattle via US-2 or I-90 and US-97, and a popular stop for anyone touring the North Cascades Highway loop. The nearest airport with commercial service is in Wenatchee, roughly 40 minutes south. If you want to reach Stehekin, plan ahead: the Lady of the Lake passenger ferry runs from Chelan’s town dock and is the primary way in, since no road connects it to the outside world.