http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/travel/in-the-cascades-a-trifecta-for-outdoor-enthusiasts.html 2014-09-18 00:20:06 In the Cascades, a Trifecta for Outdoor Enthusiasts Washington’s Stehekin Valley has great scenery, comfortable lodging and good food and relatively few visitors. Just don’t expect an easy path to get there. === It is the outdoor enthusiast’s trifecta: spectacular scenery, great lodging and food, and no crowds. Two out of three is easy enough to come by. National Park jewels like the Yosemite Valley have iconic views and great places to stay and eat, but also trails so crowded you wish they’d install passing lanes. Backpacking is a great way to access mind-blowing scenery without the traffic jams, but the quality of your lodging and food will be limited to what you’re willing to carry. An outdoorsy guy myself, I recently learned from friends about one spot that seemed to have a shot at all these: the Stehekin (pronounced steh-HEE-kin) Valley of Washington State. A small settlement wedged between fjord-like Lake Chelan and the jagged eastern slopes of the Cascades, Stehekin has several comfortable lodges, an excellent bakery and, best of all, relatively few visitors. My wife, Jen, and I visited for three days and two nights last summer, and I can confirm: Stehekin hits the trifecta. The roads are the key. Twenty-two miles of them run up and down the valley — including four miles paved — connecting the boat landing to the edge of North Cascades National Park and the valley landmarks in between. Stehekin’s roads will take you to the famous Our original plan was to hike into Stehekin via 5,400-foot Cascade Pass — one of the most popular hikes in the Cascades for its easy access to the Sahale Glacier via a ridge blazing with wildflowers. It’s a popular way into Stehekin as well, as a couple of Stehekin outfits now offer a “tent-to-tent” camping service that will leave hikers’ gear at the midway point between the Cascade Pass trailhead and the end of the Stehekin road, allowing them to complete the two-day, 19-mile hike carrying only daypacks. But we didn’t have the four extra days to hike both in and out, and a trailhead shuttle that might have allowed us to do it one way was prohibitively expensive. So instead, we decided to take the ferry in, then set our sights higher: a summit of 8,122-foot McGregor Mountain, the big black peak that looms over Stehekin Valley. The route is a 6,400-foot climb and descent over 15.4 miles with a scree and ridge scramble for the last 1,000 vertical feet — probably too much for us, but we were determined to try. First, of course, we had to get to this little Shangri-La. On a Friday afternoon, we drove east out of Seattle. Crossing through the Cascades is a remarkable lesson in the relationship between geology and weather: West of the Cascades is lush and cool, but by the time we got to the town of Chelan (pronounced shuh-LAN) in the eastern foothills, the parched landscape looked more appropriate to Arizona than famously wet Washington. It was also about 20 degrees hotter. Chelan and Stehekin lie on opposite sides of Lake Chelan. They share a history as well. When explorers first penetrated the mountains of the American West in the 19th century, they were mainly looking to extract the resources the mountains held: fur and timber, silver and gold. But by the time Lake Chelan was settled in the late 1880s, the success of Yosemite Park and the recently completed Transcontinental Railroad had people looking at the beauty of the mountains as an end in itself. Hotels were among the first structures built on the shores of Lake Chelan. Campbell’s Resort The next morning, we boarded the With ridges and peaks dominating the horizon 7,000 feet above you on all sides, the Stehekin Valley feels cozy, but it’s actually quite spread out. After checking into our hotel just above the boat landing, the first thing we did was walk down the road and rent bikes from Ron Scutt, who teaches in the Stehekin school in the off-season. He gave us helmets and seat packs, but — curiously to a city dweller — nothing to secure the bikes with. “We can just leave our bikes by the side of the road?” I asked. “No locks or anything?” “Where’s somebody going to take them?” Ron said with a laugh. “I haven’t lost a bike in 30 years.” From there, we went to the Stehekin Pastry Company, known around the Valley as simply “the Bakery.” Put it down: Any day in Stehekin that does not involve at least two visits to the Bakery is a day wasted. Its cinnamon rolls don’t just roll around your taste buds. They gambol; they frolic. The ice cream is fresh, and the coffee worthy of Seattle. With full stomachs, we headed up valley. We left our bikes at a trailhead to see if we could find an unpublished hike some locals had told us about, to a place called Emerald Pool. We couldn’t, but we did spend a pleasant couple of hours bushwhacking along a brook. Afterward, we biked up to the Stehekin River and washed our feet and hands, looking up at the snow still lingering on the southern face of McGregor Mountain, our destination for the following day. Then we continued, stopping to read about the valley’s history at the log cabin schoolhouse, admire the prismatic spray at Rainbow Falls, and poke around an apple orchard. All day, we saw only a handful of people. Jen and I do a lot of backpacking, and we agreed: It was a strange thing to have a valley like this all to ourselves on a midsummer Saturday. After all, we hadn’t paid for the beauty and solitude as we normally do, with blisters, sweat and bug bites. Instead, the locals had paid for that solitude, and continue to pay — with the inconvenience of reaching the place. So why doesn’t Stehekin have roads to the outside world? Well, it almost did. From 1896 through 1940, the proposed route of the North Cascades Highway (Route 20, the northernmost route through the Washington Cascades) passed through Stehekin Valley. But as the history of that highway shows (it took almost 80 years to be built), putting a road through the blade-sharp ridges and snowy passes of the North Cascades is hard. When we arrived in Stehekin, the first thing we did was make plans for our hike. “That’s two days,” said the ranger when we told him what we were planning. Fortunately, Nick Davis of Stehekin Reservations in the log cabin down the road offered to save us some time and drive us to the trailhead. “I’m up anyways,” he said. So just before dawn the next day, we piled into Nick’s burgundy pickup with our daypacks and trekking poles. We stopped, of course, at the Bakery, which was not yet open for regular business, but we were able to pull the employees away from a giant slab of cinnamon-covered dough to sell us day-old rolls that tasted fresher than most “fresh” pastries. Nick let us off just inside North Cascades National Park, and in the early morning shadow of the mountain we began to climb. Just above lilypad-laden Coon Lake the switchbacks started — there would be over 120 by the time we were done. The trail was long and unrelenting, but never boring. It almost felt as if the mountain had an incentive system to keep us moving upward. Every 500 vertical feet, we’d be awarded a new prize. A bird’s-eye view of Coon Lake! Lime green lichen on the pine boughs! The tree line! And, of course, the best reward for last: Glacier Peak, Washington’s most remote volcano, its glacier-cloaked summit rising above the ridge that hid it from our eyes for so long. We hit the end of the trail close to noon. Above us lay a thousand-foot scree and boulder scramble to McGregor’s summit. Below us lay the vertical mile we had just climbed, and — crucially — the shuttle that would take us from the edge of the park back to civilization. We were having dinner that night at the Stehekin Valley Ranch, where they were serving baked chicken, potatoes au gratin and at least five different homemade pies. If we pushed on, we might still catch the last shuttle down valley and make it to the Ranch on time, covered in trail dust. But if we turned around now, we could catch an earlier shuttle and have time to clean up before dinner, even stop in at the Bakery for ice cream. Jen looked at me, then said what we were both thinking. “I could really use a shower.” So we waved at Glacier Peak, cinched our boots and started back down. After all, we had dinner reservations.