Winthrop is a great little Old West themed town on the east side of the North Cascade Mountains. The area was originally inhabited by the Methow People who made seasonal hunting and fishing camps along the Methow and Chewuch Rivers. In 1891, a man named Guy Waring, who had been a Harvard classmate of Theodore Roosevelt, made a homesteading claim at the confluence of the two rivers and established a trading post. As a town grew up around Waring’s store, they chose the name Winthrop after Major Theodore Woolsey Winthrop who had traveled extensively in Washington (and elsewhere) and was one of the first Union officers killed in the Civil War. Guy Waring irrigated the town, built a sawmill, started a cattle ranch and an apple farm and ran the Duck Brand Saloon in town (now Town Hall) before returning to the east in 1917. Winthrop carried on without him. The town was an early adapter to tourism with several dude ranches opening in the 1930s. When the road through the North Cascades was finally ready to open in 1972, the people of Winthrop adopted a plan to beautify the downtown area with an Old West theme. The result is a fun town that you have to simply have to stop and wander through. I had been to Winthrop before, several years ago, and was looking forward to checking it out again on this trip through. I love the architecture in Winthrop, especially the glistening white Farmers State Bank and the Old Schoolhouse Brewery. The Shafer Museum is also excellent and is mostly outdoors so it is accessible even outside of their business hours. I really enjoyed my stay in Winthrop and the cloudy skies helped portray how chilly it was there in late fall.