Lake Chelan Butte

Lake Chelan is about an hour northeast of Leavenworth, and it's definitely worth a trip up there. The lake sparkles on a sunny day.

Several people were up here hang-gliding. It was cool to watch them take off.

Originally we'd intended to go hiking up Chelan Butte Road, but it turned out our car was able to make it up all but about 1/5th of a mile. Our guidebook had told us you would need 4 wheel drive to go the last two miles, but our Prius seemed to be doing okay, so we kept driving. We're glad we did too, since there ended up being another Prius parked next to us at the top. We would have felt stupid if we'd hiked the last couple miles only to find out our car could have made it just fine.

I loved how there were different views from all sides. On the southeast side we could see Entiat Lake and the river that flows into it.

Oscar and I both climbed up on this monstrous rock to get the full 360 degree effect.

These were the pretty hills we could see when we looked north.

And, of course, there's a lovely view of Lake Chelan to the west. Lake Chelan is a LONG lake. It's 55 miles long, actually. Chelan actually means "deep water" in the Salish language, and even though it's only the 24th deepest lake in the world, what's impressive is that it's only a mile wide at its deepest point (1,486 ft). Other deeper lakes are much wider before they reach that depth.

Oscar thought he'd pose for a Vitamin water advertisement! I think he looks HOT!!! But maybe I'm biased...

Since we hadn't actually done much hiking we decided to take the Echo Ridge loop trail. It was nifty to be able to see our car for the entire 2.25 mile loop.

There were a lot of pretty wildflowers,

But unfortunately our views of the lake were limited. Good thing we'd already gotten some fabulous pics on Chelan Butte Road.