Stehekin Rising A Living Community. A Promised Future.

For more than a century, families have called this glacier-carved valley home. Stehekin isn’t a ghost town or a museum piece. It is a real American community, schools, businesses, neighbors, and the pioneer spirit that built the West, nestled between the turquoise waters of Lake Chelan and the jagged peaks of the North Cascades.

In 1968, Congress looked at this exact place and made a deliberate choice. When it passed Public Law 90-544, lawmakers created the Lake Chelan National Recreation Area for one crystal-clear reason: to let the private community of Stehekin continue to exist and grow. The statute is unambiguous. Section 301 states the Secretary of the Interior “may not acquire any such interests within the recreation areas without the consent of the owner, so long as the lands are devoted to uses compatible with the purposes of this Act.”

Congress’s intent was written in plain English: keep land-acquisition costs minimal, preserve the existing private community, do not eliminate commercial development, and permit additional compatible growth to welcome the visitors who would soon arrive. A 1981 U.S. General Accounting Office report (CED-81-10) later confirmed it: the Park Service’s aggressive buying spree had already violated that promise, and Congress should not give them another dime until they returned compatible lands to private ownership and honored the original law.

That is the legal foundation we stand on today.

Our Vision for the Website – and for Stehekin

This website exists to finish what Congress started.

We are here to:

  • Educate every American that Stehekin is not an inconvenience to the wilderness, it is the very reason the Lake Chelan NRA was created.
  • Remind Congress and the National Park Service of their own statute and the GAO’s findings.
  • Develop a Stehekin Community Plan as the blueprint for responsible, sustainable growth that protects the valley while giving families, businesses, and future generations a place to call home.
  • Build unstoppable public support so that no federal agency can ever again treat our community as disposable.

We envision a Stehekin that grows, smartly, proudly, and legally. More family homes. Expanded lodging and services for visitors. A thriving local economy that respects the mountains and the lake. A place where kids still ride bikes to the dock, where neighbors still wave, and where the next chapter of the American story is still being written in the shadow of those peaks.

This is not nostalgia. This is justice.

Congress promised Stehekin would endure. The law demands it. The American people deserve to see it kept.

Join the fight. Share the story. Contact your representatives. Support the Stehekin Community. Help us turn a 1968 promise into a 21st-century reality.

Stehekin has the right to exist. Stehekin has the right to grow. Together, we will make sure both happen.