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The Natural Wonder of Colchuck Lake

Colchuck Lake, that unreal turquoise pool of internet fame, owes its shape and shade to an earlier time.

Not as early as you might imagine.

When you’re standing on the smooth granite of the lakeshore, the natural tendency is for your mind’s eye to wander too far back in time. Mine does. I picture a massive sheet of ice that slowly carves a hanging valley out of the batholith from which it sprang. As the Pleistocene draws to a close, the glacier slowly climbs backwards, until it tucks itself into the steep slopes beneath the col. A brief hiccup in the Little Ice Age leaves a moraine above the western shore, and then it settles into its present and, by all indications, quite final retreat.

In its long, slow wake, the glacier leaves a basin for a lake, but that alone doesn’t explain what you’re looking at. Some of the credit has to go to something much less epochal: the dam-building binge of the 1930’s.

During the depths of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, we put nature to work. Dams sprouted like a pox across North America in the geological blink of an eye. The Tennessee Valley Authority was formed; the Columbia began to be tamed by the first phase of the Bonneville; and the Colorado was enchained behind the Hoover for something like good.

Give us electricity. Let us grow crops in the desert. Sustain our homes in the saguaro-dotted sands. It seemed like a foolproof plan at the time.

A similar bout of construction happened here, albeit on a more modest scale. In the late 1920’s and extending into the 30’s, masonry and earthen dams were thrown up in the seemingly untouched, subalpine wilds of the Icicle drainage to impound more meltwater in Colchuck, Eight Mile, Snow, Nada, Klonaqua and Square Lakes.

You’d never know to look at them that they were part of an irrigation system extending miles upvalley and down. Their levels were raised to ensure a steady flow of water during dry season and drought.

You can spot the signs of their real nature easily enough, if you care to. Far downstream, as you cross the deluxe pedestrian bridge that leads from the Snow Lakes parking lot to an unending serpentine climb, your eyes might spy an aqueduct paralleling the turgid waters of Icicle Creek. It is one of the more visible sections of 40 miles of canals that route water to farms in the valley below and to the Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery.

That hatchery, the largest in the world when it was constructed, was the byproduct of yet another adventure in irrigation and hydroelectricity: it was required as a remedy for the effects on fish of what was then the largest concrete structure ever built, the Grand Coulee Dam, one of many obstacles we placed in the way of salmon traveling upriver from the ocean to spawn.

However large that hatchery might be, the runs it produces can’t compare to what was here before those many diversions along the Columbia. Salmon spawned in great numbers in the waters of the Wenatchee River and Icicle Creek. That fishery was strong enough to sustain an entire peoples at the confluence of the two streams. They.called themselves the P’squosa.

By the time the US Government displaced them in the 1800’s to make way for the railroad that still snakes its way through the mountains nearby, they were easy to shunt aside. Their numbers had been greatly diminished by disease that followed the introduction of horses to the area. The powers that be simply disregarded a treaty signed with them in 1855 and lumped them in with the Colville and a few other tribes, moving them east and north and out of the way. Most of us don’t give them a second thought (really, any thought at all) as we make the turn from US2 and drive through their erstwhile homelands on our way to this or that trail somewhere up Icicle Creek Road.

Their lands would become the site for Leavenworth, when it was established at the end of the 19th century as a mining and logging town. It attracted farmers, too, who attempted to grow fruit trees in the valley (unsuccessfully at first, due to frost). Delivering water to that agricultural experiment was the original raison d’etre of the canals built in 1901, right before the town reached its apogee. In the early 1900’s, Leavenworth was even bigger than it is in its current faux-Bavarian incarnation: 5,500 people called it home then, versus the couple thousand permanent residents now (it might seem more populous on a summer weekend, when the town’s numbers are inflated by transient visitors turning lobster red in the baking sun).

Leavenworth’s fortunes would eventually fall, but nowhere near as far (nor with the same finality) as those of the people who first called this place home. All that seems to remain of them is a smattering of place names: Colchuck, Klonaqua, Wenatchee.

Don’t you believe it! The names aren’t right. “Wenatchi '' was the name that the Yakama knew the P’squosa by (synecdoche for the place they fished, Wenatshapam), and the US Government simply adopted the term from them. “Colchuck” sounds authentic enough, but it is not from the P’squosas’ Salish tongue, but Chinook jargon, an amalgam of Chinookan and other languages (including a heaping of French) that served as a trade language betwixt the tribes and between native peoples and fur trappers, traders, and the like who started showing up in the 1600’s.

Chinook jargon traveled from the coast, up the Columbia, into the interior. While the original Chinookan is all but extinct along its former range, the jargon survives, sustained in part by newcomers, including a certain topographer who bestowed the name “col chuck” word-for-word on the “cold waters” he found in a portion of the lands he mapped.

In the decade following the construction of the dams in the Icicle drainage, a different kind of new arrival took an interest in one of the area’s more ephemeral and quixotic resources: enter the peakbagger. It was during the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s that ascents of the peaks surrounding Colchuck Lake were first recorded by the mountaineering types who assign credit for such things. “Let it be known that so-and-so was the first person to stand on such-and-such spot, which is higher than other such spots.”

Today, the hills are alive with the sound of “Worth it!” The lake’s primary function is the delivery of transitory self-gratification and temporary relief of FOMO for the thousands of people who follow in the settlers’ and summitteers’ footsteps to stake vain, itinerant claims of immortality in the form of selfies by the lakeshore (or sometimes in floaties they dragged up the trail). Trip reports and social posts are filled with the assessment that Colchuck “did not disappoint.” Colchuck is very protective of its Yelp reviews.

It is only possible for Colchuck to live up to its YOLO expectations by us ignoring everything that belies its status as a natural wonder. Conspicuously absent from all the online commentary are the things that abet our modern-day conquests, like the ribbon of asphalt that brings us to within a few miles of the lake. The parking lot is worthy of note only as an annoyance - because it’s full - as if this were an aberration and not an integral part of the experience. The pit toilet gets a callout for not being clean enough, which is odd: the river of waste flowing from thousands of modern humans landing on a small, dusty patch of space cleared from a forest should elicit precisely zero shock.  

Not mentioned at all are the dams or the P’squosa, who were here thousands of years before the purported first ascents or Instagram. This is likely the first you’re hearing of them. Surprise is the wrong word - they are hiding in plain sight, expunged through willful ignorance. By not asking the questions we don’t want to know the answers to, we repeat the role of the soldiers who paved our way. We sweep the P’squosa out of our collective memories to sustain the illusion we are taming a pristine wilderness, as if the last 200 years never happened.

If you would like to understand more about the tribe’s views on the promises made to them, please visit this documentary produced by the Confederated Colville Tribes. If you would like to read about the P’squosa in the words of their descendant, please visit P’Squosa Tribe by Mary Big Bull-Lewis.

#colchucklake hiking history washingtonstate cascademountains nativepeoples firstnations treatyrights