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Sierra Club Bulletin 



— any of them. It starts with apples, acres of orchards rising from the 

 shore of the slopes of a low hill which is only a few hundred feet higher 

 than Chocorua — apples and sagebrush and the gray dust from the roads. 

 It runs for fifty miles northwest, never more than three miles wide, and 

 ends in the heart of the high Cascades, amid snow-capped peaks and gla- 

 ciers. The lake itself is 1800 feet deep, going down 400 feet below sea- 

 level, and it is the blue of heaven, the blue of glacier ice when the sun 

 shines through it, the deep marvelous green of reflected forest walls. 

 There is no other lake like it, and, fortunately for the country, it is 

 now, with its entire watershed, above the developed land at the lower 

 end, a national forest. 



You go up the lake by motor-boat. There is absolutely no other way 

 to get to the far end. A road runs on either shore for a few miles till 

 the hills close in, and then gives up. The view from the bow of the boat 

 ten miles above the lower end is much like the view up the Hudson be- 

 tween Storm King and the Point, only the hills at Chelan are much 

 higher, and far up the vista shine the snow-capped peaks of the Cas- 

 cades. From here on the almost precipitous mountain walls, sparsely 

 clad with fir, plunge directly into the lake — there is absolutely no beach 

 whatever ; and they steadily mount higher and higher till they begin to 

 show snow. They are not broken into distinct summits, like the Rock- 

 ies, but form a castellated wall attaining finally an altitude of over 8000 

 feet. For forty miles your boat sails between them. If you can imagine 

 the Crawford Notch filled with blue water up above the level of the 

 tracks, extended another twenty miles, and Willard and Willey raised 

 tQ 8000 feet and snow-capped, you have Lake Chelan. The prospect is 

 made still more lovely by the view across the head of the lake of the 

 main ridge of the Cascades, with one or two glaciers showing. 



There are two small but comfortable hotels at the farther end, and 

 little else except primeval forest. After the lake ceases, if you wish to 

 go farther up the cafion, you take horses at the Field Hotel and follow 

 the Forest Rangers' road up the Stehekin River past Rainbow Falls, a 

 beautiful straight fall of 360 feet, into the very heart of the Cascades. 

 This trip can be made a camping trip of two, three, or more days, and 

 will take you, if you wish, into wild horseshoe basins which make Tuck- 

 erman's Ravine look like a dimple, or over the high passes, the glaciers, 

 and the snow-fields, where the world below is a wilderness of white- 

 capped summits and wild gorges. 



A "pass" in the Cascades is usually some 7000 or 8000 feet up. The 

 summit cones are mere humps in the long ridges, and the passes go over 

 the lofty cols. We went on a one-day trip up War Creek Pass, on horse- 

 back. The ranger's trail, clinging often to the sides of precipitous 

 slopes, was just wide enough to give a trained horse footing. It mount- 

 ed a shoulder of the northerly ridge, through forests of huge Douglas 

 firs and magnificent gardens of lupine, Indian paint-brush, annual lark- 

 spur, dog-tooth violets, wild syringa, and scores of other flowers. It ran 



