On the way from Montana to Lake Chelan,, we stopped in North Idaho over Labor Day weekend to visit with a friend who has a vacation house there: no phone service, no internet for the two days, during which we only left the house to walk around the area.  Monday, we traveled west: the GPS took us through the heart of the fire-blackened area east of the Columbia, where we passed a dump area of several hectares covered nearly a meter deep with apples.  At first, we thought these were from the fires, but a local resident told us that the warehouses are emptied of unsold apples from the previous year before this year’s crop is picked.

On the outskirts of Chelan stood the skeletons of several large fruit warehouses that had been directly in the path of the fire storm.  The fire blackened the entire north side of Chelan Butte, except for a few orchards, stark green squares in a field of black, but on closer examination, the outer rows of trees were turning brown.  Miraculously, the blackened areas stop at the edge of the lawns at the edge of town.  I had seen YouTube videos of a converted DC-10
slurry bomber laying a swath of red fire retardant at tree-top height behind the high school on the day the fire came to town.  Along WA 97A west of town, the brush and trees burned right down to the edge of the highway where there are no houses, but where there were houses, the buildings were intact.

At Manson, our destination, we were greeted by security guards at the entrance, a novelty for us.  We realized that, in the 20+ years we have owned a timeshare here, we have never come during the summer “peak season,” having traded our prime “red” weeks for longer stays elsewhere in the off seasons, or coming only during the winter “red” segment.  This week, with Labor Day at the start, is still classified as “red,” but, arriving on the last day of the holiday weekend, we found our condo complex nearly deserted.  There is no visible smoke in the air, and just a faint odor settled in after sunset, but I think a lot of tourists cancelled when the valley filled with smoke and was bracketed by flame in August.  The still-active fires surrounding the lake have quieted with the cooler weather and early September rain, but flared again with the return of warm weather later in the week.  Businesses have posted signs, “Yes, we are open,” but unless folks like us bother to look at the local conditions on the resort web cams and the wildfire information websites, the general impression is that the entire region is uninhabitable until covered by deep snow (which is a rare phenomena in the west in this century).

But, the emergency was real: locals related to us their days of no power, no phones or Internet, and even the local radio station went off the air during the height of the fire storm.  In Chelan, south-side residents feared for their homes, and say that, if not for the Wolverine Fire that had been burning uplake, from which air support and firefighting equipment was diverted, the entire town may have been lost.

Economically, the entire month of August was a dead loss for most of the residents whose livelihood depends on the short summer tourist season.  Meanwhile, the apple harvest is beginning, and the September tourists are here mostly on weekends.  Tuesday and Wednesday were quiet.

The process of downsizing for us includes divesting ourselves of not only the cabin in Montana, but the Lake Chelan timeshare as well: the reputation for summer wildfire and the slow economic recovery in general does not bode well for attracting buyers for resort property.  Right now, dozens of segments in our complex are for sale for less than the real estate fees, but still go unsold for years.  In many cases, the owners abandon the property, defaulting on the homeowner association fees, raising fees for everyone else, which makes the property even less attractive at any price.

We first came to Lake Chelan together in 1984, taking the Lady of the Lake ferry 90 km up the lake to Stehekin for a backpacking trip into the wilderness.  In 1989, we returned, taking our Santana tandem bike on the boat to Stehekin, staying at the horse ranch resort in a tent cabin and riding the road up the river nearly to the pass.  Naturally, the area was attractive to us as a vacation destination.

We have owned our timeshare unit at Wapato Point Resort since the early 1990s, when we thought it was a good idea to have our vacations scheduled for us, and thought that it would offer us cheap vacations in retirement if we owned a timeshare segment. Very soon, it became obvious that our schedules simply didn’t support that concept–we had to exchange weeks at least once during the Chapman University years, when my teaching schedule didn’t fit with our assigned week.  Our family obligations required us to take vacation to travel to them, so we spent some of our resort time as a non-vacation, telecommuting, a technically difficult feat when we had to make long-distance calls through the resort switchboard and then connect our modem before the answering computer aborted the connection. We brought FAX machines, when corporations didn’t yet have Internet email.  We brought sewing machines and looms, as those hobbies fit us better than water sports or fine dining.   We brought our bicycle several times and went riding in the hilly orchard and lake country around Manson, or ventured 20 km down the lake to Chelan.  Other times, we simply had to skip our vacation week, trying to rent the unit, or at least come for the weekend.  Having a Sunday-to-Sunday check-in week meant taking a Friday off at least to get more than a night in.

By 2000, we were able to “bank” our time with RCI (Resort Condominiums International) and use it to visit other resorts at our convenience.  However, even that didn’t always work out for us: we ended up skipping enough years while switching jobs so that our banked time was in danger of expiring.  For most of the 2000s, our vacations were primarily planned to consume “use or lose” time, with a 2-year limit on banked time.  Converting from a full-week schedule to “points,” that we could use to buy partial weeks helped, but each trip to a participating resort cost an exchange fee, plus annual membership in RCI.  Increasing maintenance fees from the homeowners association meant that the per-night cost of condominium vacations, ownership not withstanding, started to rise beyond our retirement budget.

We decided to sell our condo, but the economics of timeshare resale effectively lost the original investment in the condo unit, as prospective owners realized that the premise of economical luxury was a myth.  Meanwhile, we had become convinced that the “point” system and the “vacation club” model (for which we had purchased a partial share not long after we discovered the rotating week model wasn’t working well for us) was viable, as we could schedule off-season partial weeks to maximize the number of nights we could stay on our small share.  However, the value of those points in the shares continued to decline as demand increased the “price” of a night on one of the club’s properties, so that we were essentially forced to buy more points to be able to use what we had.  Of course, the vacation club also comes with annual maintenance fees, so with two plans, it is difficult to budget trips that don’t involve staying at one of the member resorts.

Selling the traditional timeshare means one less expense for our heirs to manage after we are gone, and less complication in liquidating our estate, since the timeshare comes with a deed to a share in the property.  Meanwhile, until the timeshare sells, we will continue to visit Chelan and Manson at the appointed times.  Next year, we have assigned weeks the first week in February and mid-October, which are more desirable for us than the summer season.  We’ve talked about going back to Stehekin someday, perhaps another bicycle expedition with camping, and, our other vacation club has a resort in downtown Chelan if we choose to vacation at the bottom end of the lake.

When we listed our cabin for sale during our return trip from Grand Tour 2015, we expected a long wait, and planned to return in September to continue maintenance and upgrades to make it more “move-in ready,” if you can say that about a shelter with no running water and minimal solar/battery power.  To our surprise, there was a lot of activity, probably due to the amateur photo spread we produced to focus on the cabin more than the land.  In August, we got an offer, and negotiated a settlement that satisfied all concerned.

The buyers are a young couple with a small child and horses, who intend to follow our dream of expanding the cabin into a proper starter house and future guest cottage while they build something more conventional.  Meanwhile, they have a place for their horses .and a “camp” that might see them into winter, with a few upgrades.

So, we went to Montana a bit early, to do a final walk-through and sign papers, before heading to a planned week’s retreat at Lake Chelan.  Again, we had planned that part of the trip to do some bicycling around the orchards and vinyards near Manson, but the still-active wildfires on both sides of the lake portended a smoky week, so we left the bicycle at home.  When we left, to visit a friend in North Idaho, taking a seldom-used route up the west side of Flathead Lake and west to Hot Springs, following MT 200 from Plains to the Idaho border, we left Montana for the first time in 21 years without a place of our own to go back to.  Truly, the end of an era, and the longest period of time either of us have owned property.

We left behind a lot of memories, the cabin evolving from a bare shell where we slept on an air mattress and cooked on a camp stove and lit the night with candles and oil lamps to a cozy little home with sheet-rocked walls and a real bed and solar battery-powered lights.  Our connection with the outside world advanced from trying to tune in Montana Public Radio through fading signals alternately from Missoula or Kalispell on a hand-crank-powered radio to a clear signal from the new Polson transmitter on an inverter-powered receiver.  But, even though the cabin was still unfinished (taping and spackling the sheet rock would require removing furniture and collecting enough water to clean up the dust), it would need even more maintenance, as would the two hectares surrounding it.  We simply no longer had the time and ability to keep up with it from 900 km away.  We’ll be back to Montana (this time, in only a week), with connections in Polson, Missoula, and Hamilton, but as temporary visitors.