Icicle Creek and the Enchantments
Near Leavenworth, Washington
South of Leavenworth, Icicle Creek drops out of the Cascades and joins the Wenatchee River at the edge of town. Follow the canyon south and the road winds up through a steep valley of granite and pine toward one of the most spectacular alpine landscapes in the Pacific Northwest. At the head of the drainage, above seven thousand feet, lie the Enchantments, a chain of glacier-carved lakes and rocky basins set among larch forests and jagged peaks in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness.
The subalpine larch trees that grow here are one of the few deciduous conifers in North America. Each fall before the snow comes, they turn a brilliant gold before dropping their needles, and that brief golden display draws thousands of hikers from across the region to make the steep climb to see it. Access to the Enchantments core zone is controlled by a permit lottery, because the area was attracting more visitors than the fragile landscape could absorb.
The competition for permits is intense, with tens of thousands of applications for a limited number of slots. Those who make it to the upper basin find granite polished smooth by ice, lakes of an improbable turquoise blue, and a silence broken mainly by wind and marmots. Icicle Creek below, running clear and cold through the canyon, supports healthy populations of trout and is fished by anglers who drive up from the Bavarian storefronts a few miles downstream.
