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My wife Leslie and I are blocking traffic on the Stehekin Valley Highway, riding our bikes side by side. Dappled sunlight filters past bigleaf maples tinged with the butterscotch plaid of late summer. Pileated woodpeckers call like lost souls in the woods. A light breeze whisks a plume of dust from my shoulder. If a car needed to pass it could not.

No worries. This is Stehekin.

We’ve come to this remote valley at the end of Lake Chelan for a brief getaway, and in Washington state there is hardly a better place for one. These days, where else is there zero, zilch, no, nada, cellular service? Where else can you ride bikes down the middle of the highway? Nightlife consists of owls murmuring in the woods. Gourmet dining is Stehekin Valley Ranch’s marinated flank steak, which you savor at a log-plank table in a sawdust-floor dining room after riding a bus up the highway.

The “highway” is just a single lane of asphalt in this east Cascades vale reached only by air or boat. There are just a few score cars in the valley, which cleaves into the mountains at the end of Lake Chelan. We have to pull aside barely half a dozen times in an hour-long ride, and further interruptions are for quintessential Stehekin stops.

The first is at the Stehekin Pastry Company, a thriving bakery at which it appears 10 percent of the 90 or so Stehekinites might be found at any one time. Though it’s famed for cinnamon and caramel rolls suitable for woodcutter appetites, we stop in for soup and sandwiches—pepperpot crab bisque and turkey on sourdough. Visitors are easily identified because their urban active wear is much, much snazzier than Stehekin standard jeans-with-knee-ventilation.

Up the road from the bakery we slow down for an obstacle smack in the middle of the road, a dog lolling on the asphalt studying highway happenings intently. He lifts himself in a measured fashion to head to the side of the road, still waiting for (I guess) the afternoon school bus.

A half-mile farther on is the old Stehekin one-room schoolhouse, a log-and-plank structure now a sort of community museum with lesson plans still on the blackboard and pull-down maps—remember those?—high on the walls. Yugoslavia and East Germany live on in these maps. Nearby, the new (1988) one-room school has, this year, 16 students. Another half-mile past that is the valley’s scenic centerpiece, Rainbow Falls, a 312-foot, two-part cascade that funnels snowmelt down from on high, the sort of attraction that in other parts of the country would provoke billboards urging one to “See Spectacular Rainbow Falls!” Here it’s marked by a discreet wood roadside sign that blends well with its sand and pine-needle surroundings. We park our bikes and hike through one of the smallest microclimates around, a quarter-acre greenbelt in which cedar trees thrive along the rushing waters of Rainbow Creek. Perched on rocks at the foot of the lower, smaller cascade, looking just the right way in the early afternoon light, you can indeed see a rainbow arching through the mist.

“I swear I see a double one,” claims Leslie.

I can’t find that, but no matter.

All this low-key nature impels the visitor to relax, and that’s the point. The first day in our cottage at the gloriously situated Silver Bay Inn Resort we indulge in an urban impossibility—an afternoon nap. Next day I savor two hours of excitement sunbathing, spiced by a plunge in Silver Bay, whose icy waters reflect the fact they departed a snowfield just a few miles uphill. Leslie joins me in this ultra-quick swim. “Just loop right around to the canoe landing,” I advise. “No kidding,” she says after 21 seconds in the water.