The highway that turned Winthrop, Washington into an Old West town opened exactly 54 years ago this week

Every building on Winthrop’s Riverside Avenue is wearing a costume. The false fronts, the hitching posts, the hand-painted saloon signs — none of it dates back to the actual frontier. The whole look is younger than the interstate highway system, and it exists because of one road.

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A theme town built for a highway’s grand opening

North Cascades Highway, or SR-20, opened on September 2, 1972 — connecting Winthrop to the rest of Washington by car for the first time in the town’s history. That’s 54 years ago this week.

Ahead of the opening, the town brought in architect Robert Jorgenson, the same designer behind Leavenworth’s Bavarian look, to give downtown an Old West makeover. New false-front storefronts, boardwalk sidewalks, and hitching posts went up along Riverside Avenue, and every building added to the town center since has had to match the theme.

The town wasn’t even named for anyone who lived there

Guy Waring opened the first trading post here in January 1892, right where the Chewuch and Methow rivers meet. He’s considered Winthrop’s founding father, but the town isn’t named after him.

The first postmaster named it for Theodore Winthrop, a Yale-educated writer who crossed the Cascades on horseback in 1853. His account of that trip, The Canoe and the Saddle, wasn’t published until 1862 — a year after he died fighting in the Civil War.

A fire tore through the young settlement in 1893, and the town rebuilt from there. It formally incorporated in 1924, decades before anyone thought to paint it Western.

What’s actually worth doing before the season turns

Winthrop holds about 500 year-round residents — 504 at the last census — tucked into the Methow Valley, a roughly 60-mile glacial valley running from Pateros up to Mazama.

Floating the Methow River through downtown is one of the valley’s best warm-weather rituals, and the window is short. Outfitters typically run tubes and rafts from July through mid-September, so there’s only a couple of weeks left to catch it this year.

Sun Mountain Lodge, just outside town, keeps more than 40 miles of hiking and biking trails open to day visitors, plus two outdoor pools and hot tubs looking out over the valley. Downtown, the Shafer Historical Museum fills several buildings with Methow Valley pioneer artifacts from the 1880s through the 1940s — admission runs by donation, with $10 suggested for adults.

Get there before winter closes the road

Winthrop sits about 197 miles from Seattle by way of the North Cascades Highway, a drive of roughly four and a half hours that cuts straight through the national park. That’s the reason to hurry: SR-20 shuts down for the season every winter once snow and avalanche risk take over, typically sometime between mid-November and early December. Last year, it held on until December 4.

Trip tips: grab a rental car to get out here, lock in your hotel before the good rooms are gone, or skip both and book a camper van instead.

The pass won’t stay open forever. Worth planning the drive before it closes?

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