Among Washington’s Alps: Fourth Grade in Holden Village, East of Winston

Set in the 1950s in the upper Lake Chelan valley, A Year in the Washington Alps is a memoir of one long, crystalline year spent in Winston, the cluster of miners’ houses above the better-known company town of Holden Village. Through a fourth-grader’s eyes we see a world that is small and complete: cottages clinging to the hillside, the rope-tow ski hill just beyond the last row of houses, the Rec Hall with its movies, bowling lanes, and square dances, and the mine whose twenty-year life quietly defines the horizon of the adults.

The story moves through a season of small adventures—school days, Cub Scouts, hikes, snowstorms, the first experiments with courage and fear—while in the background parents navigate work, money, and the question of what comes after the ore runs out. It’s a book about a particular place and time, but also about how a child learns to read a community’s seams and fault lines, and carries that little mountainside world forward for the rest of his life.