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Updated: June 15, 2025
Little of Lake Chelan can be seen at one time, for its course among the mountains to the west is a very crooked one. The noisy steamer leaves the town at the foot of the lake and in the course of ten miles steeper slopes begin to close in upon us. Many little homes are scattered along this portion of the lake, wherever there is a bit of land level enough to raise fruit and vegetables.
One of these cañons, deeper and longer than the rest, has been blocked by a dam at its lower end. Beautiful Lake Chelan lies in the basin thus formed. It begins only three miles from the Columbia River, but winds for sixty miles among the rugged and steep-walled mountains, terminating almost in the heart of the range.
It is easy to believe in God there. And the stars and heaven seem very close. One thing died there forever for me my confidence in the man who writes the geography and who says that, representing the earth by an orange, the highest mountains are merely as the corrugations on its skin. On Cascade Pass is the dividing-line between the Chelan and the Washington National Forests.
The water seethed and boiled, and I stood still and fished, because a slip on that spray-covered ledge and I was gone, to be washed down to Lake Chelan, and lie below sea-level in the Cascade Mountains. Which might be a glorious sort of tomb, but it did not appeal to me. I tried different flies with no result.
It was almost sunset, and the far Chelan peaks were touched with Alpine fire; below them an amethyst mist filtered over the transformed vale. They had been discussing the architecture of the building. "I had often gone over the map of the project with David," she said, "but he must have drawn the plans of the house later, in Alaska. It was a complete surprise.
Two of them did not cross the pass, however the Forest Pathologist from Washington, who travels all over the country watching for tree-diseases and tree-epidemics and who left us after a few days, and the Supervisor of Chelan Forest, who had but just come from Oregon and was making his first trip over his new territory.
Wherever water could be utilized were orchards, little trees planted in geometrical rows and only waiting the touch of irrigation to make their owners wealthy beyond dreams. The lower end of Lake Chelan was surrounded by these bleak hillsides, desert without the great spaces of the desert. Yet unquestionably, in a few years from now, these bleak hillsides will be orchard land.
It was from Chelan that we were to make our start. Long before we arrived, Dan Devore and the packers were getting the outfit ready. Yet the first glimpse of Chelan was not attractive. We had motored half a day through that curious, semi-arid country, which, when irrigated, proves the greatest of all soils in the world for fruit-raising.
There are also hieroglyphic figures far up on the rocks of Lake Chelan, which is supposed to have once been an arm of the Columbia. These paintings or picture-writings must have been made when the water was so high in the lakes that they could be done by men in boats.
For besides these two, the Pathologist and the Forest Supervisor, there was "Silent Lawrie" Lindsley, naturalist, photographer, and lover of all that is wild, a young man who has spent years wandering through the mountains around Chelan, camera and gun at hand, the gun never raised against the wild creatures, but used to shoot away tree-branches that interfere with pictures, or, more frequently, to trim a tree into such outlines as fit it into the photograph.
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