Drive Squilchuck Road on a Saturday in December and you already know the bottleneck: the switchbacks past the state park boundary narrow to one lane in spots, and when the lot at the top fills, cars stack up along the shoulder waiting for a space to open. That road, and the one that continues past it to the resort's main parking area, is the only way to reach Mission Ridge Ski and Board Resort. It's also the only way out if something goes wrong up there.
For anyone who lives along that corridor or skis the mountain most weekends, the resort's decade-long expansion proposal has probably arrived in pieces: a headline about a lawsuit here, a public meeting notice there, an economic study claiming a billion-plus in benefits, a Facebook thread about trail closures. What often gets lost across all those pieces is that nearly every objection filed against the project, whether it's about wildfire evacuation, backcountry trailhead parking, or road capacity, points back to the same physical constraint. This isn't really a fight about ski terrain. It's a fight about whether one road can carry what's being proposed for the land above it.
A Decade of the Same Argument
The timeline matters here because it explains why this feels like it's been going on forever, because it has.
- 2014: Mission Ridge owner Larry Scrivanich, operating under the corporate name Tamarack Saddle LLC, purchased roughly 800 acres of private land adjacent to the existing resort.
- 2018: Tamarack Saddle formally applied to Chelan County and the U.S. Forest Service to expand the resort onto that land.
- 2020: After two years of review, then-interim Community Development Director Deanna Walter told the resort the project's size triggered a lengthy and costly environmental review process.
- September 2021: Tamarack Saddle sued Chelan County and Natural Resources Director Mike Kaputa, seeking more than $6 million in damages and alleging the county had illegally delayed the permitting process.
- Early 2023: Visiting judge Robert Grim, sitting in Douglas County Superior Court after the local judge recused himself, ruled in the county's favor, finding no evidence of a conspiracy to delay the project.
- September 2025: Chelan County released the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, opening a 45-day public comment period scheduled to run through October 21.
That's the skeleton. What it doesn't show is how much the underlying dispute has stayed the same the entire time: does the road network serving Mission Ridge have the capacity for what's being proposed, and who decides that before shovels go in the ground.
What the Draft EIS Actually Proposes
The project on the table now covers about 1,090 acres of combined public and private land, layered onto a resort that currently operates on more than 2,000 leased acres from the Forest Service and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. Roughly 630 of those new acres would become skiable terrain, based on reporting on the Draft EIS. The rest is the part that has generated most of the public comment: a base village.
As currently proposed, that village would include a 57-room hotel, 621 condominiums, townhomes and duplexes, and 265 single-family homes, most of them intended for short-term use, along with new commercial space, a snow tubing area, and Mission Ridge's first dedicated Nordic ski trails. Friends of Mission Ridge, the advocacy group that has organized much of the opposition, puts the total added capacity at 7,812 beds once the full five-phase buildout is complete, a process the Chelan County project narrative describes as unfolding over roughly 20 years.
Mission Ridge frames the numbers differently. An economic study commissioned from ECOnorthwest and released alongside the Draft EIS projects more than $1.2 billion in economic activity for Chelan and Douglas counties over the next 20 years, plus roughly 200 new jobs in the first decade. The resort's own materials describe the current operation, in business since 1966, as having struggled financially for much of its history, and argue that new lodging revenue is what would finally fund improvements like additional chairlifts.
The Number Nobody in This Fight Disputes
Whatever side people land on, the Draft EIS's own traffic projections for the first phase alone are the figure that keeps surfacing in public comment, because it's the one both supporters and opponents cite without arguing about the math.
| Metric | Phase 1 projected change |
|---|---|
| Weekday vehicle trips | +89% |
| Saturday vehicle trips | +112% |
That's before any of the later four phases are built. Cascade Backcountry Alliance, in its formal comment letter, called the road issue central enough that it urged Mission Ridge to consider a community benefit agreement, a mechanism that would direct a share of resort revenue toward road maintenance and trail infrastructure rather than leaving those costs to the county alone.
Where the Local Trails Meet the New Boundary
The traffic numbers explain why people who live along the corridor are paying attention, but the terrain fight is what's animated the backcountry community specifically.
Two winter non-motorized recreation zones, Stemilt Basin and Clara Lakes, were established in 2022 after nearly a decade of collaborative planning among the local advocacy group El Sendero, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Department of Natural Resources, and Chelan County. Under the current Draft EIS, the uphill route that backcountry skiers use to access upper Stemilt Basin originates from the existing ski area parking lot and climbs terrain that would sit directly beneath a proposed new chairlift, inside the expanded resort boundary. Cascade Backcountry Alliance's comment letter argues that route would likely become functionally inaccessible once it's absorbed into resort operations, assuming Mission Ridge continues applying its existing uphill travel restrictions.
The same letter flags a second, more mundane problem: the new access road proposed for the village would reduce parking in the resort's existing main lot, which currently doubles as the trailhead for Clara and Marion Lakes and for routes up to Mission Peak. The Draft EIS proposes a replacement lot roughly a mile from the trailhead, a distance the Alliance argues isn't practical for regular backcountry access.
The Road Argument Underneath Everything
Opposition to the project isn't organized around any single issue. It's a mix of traffic, wildfire risk, water quality, and wildlife habitat, and Friends of Mission Ridge director Mike Rolfs has been the most public voice pushing back on the county's own analysis. Rolfs told the Wenatchee World the Draft EIS contained
"104 unclear, misleading, untrue, incomplete, arbitrary and persuasive statements."
But read through the individual public comment letters Chelan County has posted to its own project archive, and the recurring thread isn't wildlife corridors or water tables. It's the road. One commenter, identifying themselves as a Wenatchee resident living near the project site, wrote that the scale of housing being added, condos, townhouses, and single-family homes combined, was equivalent to a town roughly the size of Cashmere, and that the single road in and out left them worried about what would happen if a wildfire broke out in the lower basin while that road was the only way anyone could leave.
Not every comment ran that direction. Other residents wrote in support, arguing the expansion was long overdue and that phased buildout gave the county room to course-correct if the road or the terrain couldn't handle it. One supporter, who described having skied and hiked the area for eight years, cited a locally made film called "Lifted" that celebrated what Mission Ridge has meant to the community, and said their first reaction to reading about the expansion in the Wenatchee World was excitement, tempered by concern about parking pressure at the Mission and Squilchuck lots.
Where This Stands This Fall
The public comment period on the Draft EIS was scheduled to close October 21, 2025. As of this fall, Chelan County has not issued a final environmental impact statement or a decision on the project's permits. The county's comment archive alone runs to hundreds of individual letters, everything from formal filings by advocacy groups to handwritten concerns from people who live a few miles up the mountain. Whatever comes next, whether that's a revised alternative, additional traffic mitigation, or a scaled-back village, will be built on top of a road system that hasn't changed since this debate started in 2014.
For anyone who drives Squilchuck or Mission Ridge Road regularly, that's the detail worth tracking more than any acreage figure or dollar projection. The county can revise phase timelines. It can require a new parking lot or a widened shoulder. What it can't easily do is add a second way in or out of the basin, and until that changes, every argument about this project eventually loops back to the same stretch of pavement.
Coldwell Banker Cascade pays attention to land-use questions like this one because they shape daily life on Mission Ridge Road as much as any transaction ever will. Connect with a local expert today.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
