Stehekin Dreaming

 

The Bakery of Legend!

The Cinnamon Roll of Perfection!

                Mike and Taylor left on Friday and Kyle arrived in Stehekin on Saturday.  Which was awesome.  We immediately went to the incredible Stehekin Bakery.  This bakery is stuff of legend. Cinnamon rolls as big as your face with buttery, cinnamony, awesome flavor.  Really.  In the flying world there is something called the $100 Hamburger.  Essentially bored pilots get up on Saturday morning, gas up the light aircraft and fly to some Podunk airfield to buy a hamburger. By the time they’ve got the hamburger and paid for gas, they’ve spent $100. Hence the $100 hamburger.  Well these cinnamon rolls would be the $50 dollar cinnamon rolls- by the time you’ve paid for the boat ride and the bus to the bakery, you’ve spent $50 and worth every freaking penny. Plus, they have a killer egg salad sandwich and scones delicate and flavorful enough to make you cry.  Oh and their bread and their cookies are really good too. Plus the whole thing is in this really cozy log cabin that smells like cinnamon rolls and happiness. And their staff is composed of bubbly young women in adorable aprons listening to bluegrass.  I’m not joking.

                Anyway, after stuffing our faces we prepared for the next trip up to a place called High Bridge. From here we’d be doing some day hikes to study more of the geology of the valley.  It was overall a great trip.  It rained the first day, but only after we were mostly done with the work and had set up the tent. Plus there was a CCC shelter for us to cook in, so we stayed pretty dry.  

 

One of the awesome views from the Goode Lookout Trail

                The best day was working up the Goode Lookout trail- about 5 miles and ~4000 ft elevation gain, at the summit you get a view of the whole Bridge Creek valley. I liked it because I could see nearly 1/3 of my field area, which was pretty cool. We also ran into a mother bear and cub and accidentally sent the cub up the tree and the mom running, so we backed off for a half hour and let them work that out.  

The Stehekin Garden

Dinner from the Garden

                After this trip Kyle and I worked by canoe along the upper part of the Lake.  This was awesome because every day we went to the Stehekin Garden (grown with LOVE!) and bought fresh broccoli and salad and beets and snap peas and had awesome dinners.  It only took two days of trying to finish the work. Why two days of trying?  Well, let me explain.  Lake Chelan is 50 miles long and at its widest about 1 mile across.  When it gets windy on Lake Chelan you get stuck (Kyle tells me the correct term for this is “windbound”, being a sailor this is not in my vernacular).  Did I mention no roads?  So if you’re in a canoe 2 miles from Stehekin, you don’t get dinner and you’re pretty sad.  The first day we went out in very calm winds that quickly picked up, we turned around and struggled back to Stehekin just in time. Just in time for what?  A storm followed that dumped 2.5 inches of rain and hail in 20 minutes and had gusts up to ~35 mph.  Close call!!  The next day (my sister’s birthday!) we did the whole 7 miles of lakeshore that we needed to finish, like a boss.

Petroglyphs along the lakeshore

Hard working field assistant.

My yearly photograph wishing my sister a happy birthday on July 21.