Lake Chelan's Winterfest

If you met someone from Michigan, you would probably expect him or her to be an expert in freezing cold temperatures and layers of sweaters, the kind of person who has all sorts of cool tricks to scrape off a cake's thickness of ice from your windshield on frosty mornings.  But many who grew up in Northern Michigan either try to endure the cold by never leaving the house in the winter - ever - or relocate to Florida as early in life as possible, even if "early in life" means sixty-five to you.

But Western Washington weather is not a big deal to someone who once got stuck walking in knee-deep snow on the sidewalk of a lakeside town (yes, really - it was embarrassing).  The sky could be as gray and foreboding as anything in a Lemony Snicket book or "The Fall of the House of Usher," but with no snow and milder temperatures in winter, it's like a heat wave.

And still, one or two days a year, it seems appropriate to take a day trip to the snow that you no longer have to drive in...

Winterfest is a beautiful time to go to Lake Chelan in January.  This is the view at dusk:



Points of interest depend on the weekend you're going, but highlights include horse-drawn sleigh rides, fireworks, a Wish Lantern lighting, a Wine Walk, and the lighting of an ice tower.  And for those who are, like me, babies about the cold, there are tons of places to get warm, from bonfires to hot chocolate vendors.  Or, if you're like my husband, a place that specializes in alcoholic cider - one of the many businesses that are popping up around Washington that the Midwest has never heard of.





Wish Lanterns Lighting

At 6:00 p.m., as soon as the sun went down, five hundred floating "wish lanterns" went into the air over Lake Chelan.  If you've ever seen that scene in Tangled where Flynn and Rapunzel are surrounded by these lanterns on a boat with no concern for them landing and setting said boat on fire, you basically know the gorgeous visual that was on display over the lake that night.  And because these are wish lanterns, the Chamber of Commerce has provided stations with markers to make sure you write your wish down before you let your lantern float away.

And even if you didn't want to buy a lantern, you should still come and check it out as a free event, because these pictures speak for themselves:





Fire + Ice: The Ice Tower Lighting

Not to keep you out in the cold for too long, a half hour later is the burning of the ice tower.  Like an open box stacked with wood in the middle and then torched from within, the fire erupts from the top of the ice blocks like a volcano, then surges, and finally crumbles.  While this an interesting watch for two younger adults, the ones who really ate this up were the kids.

Check out the before and after:

Cider, Wine, and Beer - or Children's Activities

If the hot chocolate and bonfires don't warm you up, there's a lot for adults to try in the beer, cider, and wine department.  The other group Winterfest seems to have a lot for is children, but as my husband and I are childless, we had little incentive to try those activities.  Before I focus on a couple of tasting rooms, I wanted to say that while children and wine-drinking adults seem like two opposite crowds, the main events (such as fireworks, the wish lantern lighting, etc.) appealed well to both.

Rootwood Cider Co.  - The first place we tried a flight was in downtown Manson at Rootwood Cider Co.  In Seattle, we are used to crazy cider combinations, like being infused with pineapple or coffee, but at Rootwood, they look at cider like one looks at a fine wine.  Drier, sweeter, hints of vanilla, subtle fruit flavors all went into the $5 flight of four we tried.

My recommendation is for the limited release "Dry Hopped," with a sweet-yet-tart flavor infused with hops - the blend is hard-to-describe but mellow and smooth, the flavors complimenting each other.  And this from someone who doesn't typically like hops.

Tsillan Cellars - Atop a hill right outside Chelan (and overlooking Lake Chelan) sits gorgeous, Tuscan-style Tsillan Cellars.  With its its roaring fireplace, velvet throws, and vauted ceilings, it's a decadent stop for wines with bold flavors.  A flight of five of these wines will be about $10.





IETM recommends the sweet, full-bodied, and oak-infused 2013 Reserve Syrah, and the fruit-filled notes of the 2015 Riesling.

If you've never been to Lake Chelan in the winter, this is the weekend to go.  The snowy mountains are picture-perfect, and the free activities (or buy a button from The Chamber of Commerce for sleigh rides and in-town discounts) are a great way to enjoy the season.

Silent Night: The Ghost Town of Lester, Washington

One of America's coolest and spookiest little ghost towns lies far up in the mountains in Stampede Pass in King County, Washington.  

Follow a winding dirt road up in the mountains for a half hour or so, park your car in the little grassy knoll by the "foot traffic only" sign, and hike to one of Washington's strangest remote attractions.

Welcome to Lester

As we followed the path by the railroad tracks, boots sticky with mud, it appeared in the distance like a mirage: windowless houses, the paint peeling off the shutters, the pile of wooden rubble that used to be a warehouse, part of it still standing on shaky, skeletal legs.  

This is Lester, Washington.

We walked across the tracks, watching for rusty steel bric-a-brac that poked out at odd angles, and over to the houses.  The doors were wide open and dark.  Broken glass crunched under my feet as I stood, trying to get the best pictures I could of the interior of the first house.

Lester is original in that it looks like the people that used to live in the town vanished into thin air, leaving evidence of another time.  We waded through old mattresses, ancient cans of tuna, baby plates still left out on the table as if dinner is about to be served.











Lester's fate wasn't disease.  It wasn't natural destruction of an impending landslide or warnings of an erupting volcano.

People in Lester were forced out gradually, because the city of Tacoma trying to protect its drinking water, which lies on the same property.

The Lester Gate War

In the early 1960's, Tacoma sought to block access to the town by closing the gate on the Western side in what became known as The Lester Gate War.  Citizens of Lester became very vocal that the road into their town should not be blocked.

In the end, the court ruled in favor of the city of Tacoma, and the gate was closed.

But the town refused to die out.  Lester wanted - it tried - to rally and stay vital to the community.  People wanted to protect the homes, their jobs, and their school.

Other forces sealed Lester's fate while Tacoma aggressively tried to make sure it gained Lester's land as its own property:

The railway closed down.  The logging camp was abandoned.  Finally, townspeople put money and energy into saving its school while the town emptied of residents.

Tacoma responded by asking for consolidated school districts, which would close Lester's school of five students.  At last, there was nothing left in Lester, save a few people who could not bear to leave their homes.

People of Lester held a mock funeral for the death of their town.  The war was over, and they had lost.



The Cabins in the Woods

On the other side of the tracks, we came to a rusted car graveyard.  Beyond the metal scrap, you could make out the dead end of a subdivision.  There was an old trailer stripped bare; inside another, a hastily left kitchen with an old coffee pot looking ready to brew.  Sunshine beamed in from a far window.  I shivered in the darkness and followed the rickety stairs to the attic.







I could feel my heart catch in my throat thinking about Gertrude Murphy, a teacher who tried to get some of the (already abandoned) town saved as historic places.  She was denied.  Still, she didn't want to leave. She was considered the town's last remaining resident.

Eventually, she left too, but not without a fight.  It is that fight that inspires me to keep working toward social justice solutions to prominent issues that plague America today.

Sure, we might not be able to stand up to the bigger town or the faceless corporation.  But if you have to go down, go down like Lester.

Life in the Pacific Northwest (As Seen by a Girl from Cow Country)

On March 8th, 2015, I stepped onto a plane and changed my life.

Fresh out of college, I was living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, surviving black ice, white outs, subzero temperatures, and the occasional snowstorm in June.  With temperatures recently a negative thirty-seven degrees with windchill, the gray and rain of Seattle seemed a cheerful respite.

The economy was hopping here, there were plenty of coffee shops (always a plus for recent graduates), and the quirky, introverted vibe of the city appealed to me, someone from a rural farming community that had always felt more metropolitan, creative, and different than the other farmers' kids.

Well, here we are almost two years later in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.

People talk a lot about the different between the West Coast or East Coast and more rural America.  I am from a small town of less than two thousand people; all of my relatives still live there.  Now, I live in the suburbs of a giant West Coast city, but my roots remain firmly in Michigan.

This blog is about a Midwesterner's view of the West Coast.  It's part-travelogue for Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, and the surrounding states.  It's also partly about Michigan and the Midwest.

At the center of it all is a more personal story about the choices we make, the people we leave behind (but never forget), and the new homes we create for ourselves when we leave our old worlds to the pages of memory.

And yes, it's about an introvert navigating the corporate and social worlds of a chaotic city known for its infamous "Seattle Freeze."

Welcome to "Introvert Escapes the Mitten."