The story
Holden is one of the most remote ghost towns in the lower 48. There is no road: you take a boat fifty miles up Lake Chelan to the Lucerne landing, then climb eleven miles into the North Cascades. The trip is most of the experience.
The Holden Mine was Washington's largest copper producer, shipping copper, zinc, and gold from 1938 to 1957. The company village that served it had about 600 people, with a school, a gymnasium, and a bowling alley — a complete small town, three mountain valleys from anywhere. When copper prices fell in the late 1950s, a mine that had to barge its ore down a lake was the first kind to close.
The village was sold to the Lutheran church in 1960 for a token payment and became Holden Village, a retreat community that still uses the original buildings. The mining landscape around it — portals, tram ruins, and tailings that took a decade of remediation — is going back to wilderness on its own schedule.
What remains today
The preserved company village (now a retreat center), mine portals, tramway remnants, and remediated tailings along Railroad Creek.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
Stamp your passport
Check in at Holden — GPS-verified visits earn an inked stamp.
File a field report
Road conditions, what's still standing, what's gone — your report joins the record.
Add photographs
Credited, dated, and preserved as part of Holden's permanent record.
No field reports yet — sign in to file the first.