The Count Stopped in 2023. The Hawks Kept Coming Over Hawk's Meadow.

Drive out the gate at Hawk's Meadow on a clear September morning and look up. If you time it right, somewhere above the golden hills a red-tailed hawk is riding a thermal north to south, gaining altitude in slow circles before it tips into a glide toward the next ridge. It happens every fall, whether or not anyone is standing on a rock thirteen miles away counting it.

For twenty-five years, someone was. From 1998 to 2023, HawkWatch International ran a standardized raptor count on Chelan Ridge, a stretch of the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest that sits directly in the Pacific Coast Flyway. Six volunteer biologists a season would hike up, set up an observation post near Cooper Mountain, and count everything that flew past from late August into late October. Then, on May 10, 2023, the organization ended the program. Whether or not the developers who named this neighborhood had that ridge in mind, the coincidence holds up every autumn: Hawk's Meadow sits close enough to a real, working hawk migration corridor that most of the internet still describes as fully staffed. It isn't anymore. The birds haven't gotten the memo, and neither have most of the websites still pointing people there.

What Actually Ended in 2023

HawkWatch International's own announcement was direct about the reason: after twenty-five years of standardized counts, the organization cited limited funding for this kind of long-term work as the deciding factor. The Chelan Ridge site was one of several the group has operated across the West, and it was the one that lost its long-term funding. The Forest Service partnership that made the site accessible in the first place, work credited to Kent Woodruff, John Rohrer, Janet Millard and Ana Cerro among others, ran alongside the count for over two decades before the decision came down.

That single fact hasn't caught up with most of what's still indexed online. Trail guides, birding blogs and old event listings from Audubon chapters and the Wenatchee River Institute still describe a season where an educator is stationed at the site daily, a tally board sits in the parking lot, and biologists work a trapping blind in front of visitors. That was true as recently as 2022. It has not been true since the spring of 2023.

What's Still True Right Now

Here's the part that didn't change: the geography that made Chelan Ridge worth staffing in the first place is exactly the same today, and this is peak season for it. The ridge sits where the Lake Chelan valley and the Methow River valley meet, and the resulting updrafts let migrating raptors climb without much wingbeat effort, which is precisely why the corridor concentrates so many birds in a narrow band of sky each fall. In a typical season, HawkWatch's counts there ranged from roughly 1,600 to 3,000 migrating raptors across as many as 17 species, with sharp-shinned hawks, red-tailed hawks, Cooper's hawks, northern harriers, golden eagles and American kestrels as the regulars. Some seasons also turned up rarer sightings, including a black merlin and Harlan's red-tailed hawk, the kind of bird that draws people up a forest road on purpose.

None of that biology cared about a funding decision. The window is still late August through late October. Mid-September, which is where the calendar sits right now, falls squarely inside it.

What changed is what you'll find when you get there. There's no funded crew, no daily educator, no guarantee of a tally board waiting in the parking lot. The trail is still public national forest land and still open to anyone willing to make the drive.

Getting There Without a Staffed Crew

The site sits about 13 miles northwest of Chelan, and there are two established ways in depending on which direction you're coming from.

Both routes end the same way: a short hike on foot to reach the actual overlook. A four-wheel-drive vehicle is the safer call given how the last few miles are unpaved and can be rough, though standard cars and vans have made the trip. There's no fee to visit, since it's national forest land, but there's also no guarantee anyone official will be there to answer questions when you arrive.

What You're Giving Up, and What You're Not

The honest version of this trip looks different from the one that used to get written about:

• Gone: the funded seasonal crew, the daily on-site educator, the live bird-banding demonstrations that used to happen in front of visitors, the reliability of a staffed tally board updating counts in real time.
• Still here: the ridge itself, the updraft pattern that concentrates migrating raptors into a visible corridor, the late-August-to-late-October window, the free public access, and the birds.

If you go expecting a guided experience, you'll be disappointed. If you go expecting a quiet overlook with a real chance of watching a golden eagle or a kestrel ride the same air current researchers spent twenty-five years documenting, you'll get exactly that.

The Easier Pairing for the Same Weekend

If the forest-road drive to Chelan Ridge sounds like more commitment than a Saturday calls for, Echo Ridge is the closer, gentler option and it's also in its best fall condition right now. The trail system sits about 20 minutes from Chelan and Manson, off Highway 150 via Boyd Road, and offers more than 30 miles of trail built originally for Nordic skiing but wide open for hiking and mountain biking from spring through fall. Trail conditions there tend to improve after the season's first few rain events and typically stay snow-free well into November, which makes a September or October visit close to ideal timing. It won't put a raptor overhead the way Chelan Ridge can, but it's a fifteen-minute detour from Hawk's Meadow's own gate rather than an hour-plus forest-road trek, and it pairs naturally with a shorter fall outing if the migration hike is more than you want to take on in one day.

Why This Is Worth Knowing If You Already Live Here

Hawk's Meadow is a small community by design. Census figures put the neighborhood's year-round population at 64 residents across 49 twenty-acre lots, and the people who've settled there list hiking and trails, wine tasting and gardening among their top shared interests. That's a place where knowing the difference between what the internet still says about a nearby landmark and what's actually true carries real weight. The next person who mentions "the hawk count" at a neighborhood gathering is probably working from a page that hasn't been updated since 2022. Now you'll know the count itself is gone, but the show it used to document is still running on schedule, thirteen miles from your own front gate.

Whether you're heading up to Chelan Ridge this fall or sticking closer to home on the Echo Ridge trails, that's the kind of local detail that only shows up when you actually live here long enough to notice what changed and what didn't. If you're curious about more of what makes this valley worth paying attention to season after season, Jessie Simmons keeps a running guide to Lake Chelan life for exactly that reason, whether or not real estate is anywhere on your mind this week.