Three big reservoirs sit along this stretch of the Cascade crest, and we have written about two of them: Lake Easton, the shallow one beside the freeway at Exit 70, and Kachess, the deep one at Exit 62 that we usually point guests toward because it is twenty minutes from our gate.
Lake Cle Elum is the one almost nobody here drives to, and it is bigger than either. WDFW lists it at 4,566.30 acres — about 190 acres more than Kachess and roughly twenty-two times the surface of Lake Easton. It is also the only one of the three with a salmon story attached to it, and the one that drains earliest.
Here is the honest picture, with the figures taken from the agencies that publish them.
Lake Cle Elum in orientation
- Where: about seven miles northwest of the town of Cle Elum, up Highway 903
- From our gate: about 30 minutes — I-90 east to Exit 80, then Highway 903 north through Roslyn and Ronald
- Size: 4,566.30 acres at 2,227 feet elevation, 7.4 miles long and about a mile across at its widest
- Campground on the lake: one — Wish Poosh, 34 sites, Memorial Day to mid-September
- Free day use: Speelyi Beach, on the south end, daylight hours only
- Boat ramp: "typically closed by early July due to low water"
- Fishing: open year-round, two-pole allowed, with a 9-to-15-inch slot on kokanee
- Right now: the campground season is over, and the fire closure order runs through the end of October
The biggest of the three, and the first to go dry
The lake sits behind Cle Elum Dam, a 165-foot earthfill structure built in 1933 on the Cle Elum River, holding an active capacity of 436,900 acre-feet. Like Kachess and Keechelus, it is a working part of Reclamation's Yakima Project, and the water that floats your boat in June is irrigating orchards downstream by September.
WDFW puts it plainly: the Forest Service provides boat launch and camping facilities, but "there are no boat launch facilities after mid-summer" because of "excessive reservoir drawdown." The Forest Service gives the date. Its Wish Poosh campground page states that "the boat ramp is typically closed by early July due to low water."
Early July. Kachess, one valley west, usually holds its launch into the first week of August — in 2026 Recreation.gov posted the date outright as August 1. Lake Cle Elum gives you roughly a month less, so if the trip depends on a trailer and a motor, this is the wrong lake of the three; our guide to Lake Kachess camping and day use covers the better one.
If you are carrying a kayak, a paddleboard or a swimsuit, the shrinking shoreline matters much less. WDFW rates shoreline access here as "Good," and the exposed flats at the south end are a large part of why the beach down there gets as busy as it does.
Wish Poosh: the only campground on the lake
Wish Poosh is at 15311 Salmon la Sac Road in Ronald, about 10 miles northwest of Cle Elum on Highway 903, at roughly 2,250 feet. It is the only Forest Service campground actually on the lakeshore, and it is small: 34 campsites suitable for RVs or tents, a mix of reservation-only and first-come, first-served, booked through Recreation.gov.
Fees are $22 a night for a single site, $43 for a double, and $11 for an additional vehicle. In exchange: portable toilets, picnic tables, and the Forest Service's flat statement that "potable water is not available at this site." No hookups are listed, and no dump station. Bring your own water, all of it. The season is Memorial Day to mid-September, about 15 weeks.
Payment is by "Scan & Pay" from a phone, and the Forest Service recommends downloading the Recreation.gov app before your trip — sensible, because coverage up the 903 corridor is patchy and the fee post is a poor place to find that out. For the cost-and-hookup comparison against a private park like ours, RV park vs. state park camping in Washington lays the two models side by side.
Speelyi Beach: the free one
This is the part most day-trippers miss. Day use at Wish Poosh carries an $11 per vehicle per day fee, the same as Kachess. Speelyi Beach, a few miles back toward town, is free — the Forest Service page states "no fees are required."
It is a "heavily-used sandy beach area located on the south end of Lake Cle Elum" at about 2,200 feet, reached by driving 7 miles north from Cle Elum on Highway 903, turning left onto Lake Cabins Road and going about half a mile. There are vault toilets, no potable water, and a loaner life-jacket board. Swimming and non-motorized boating are the main uses.
Two rules to know before you go. The site is daylight hours only, with no overnight camping — a standing Forest Service order bars being in the area between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., aimed at damage to the shoreline. And parking is restricted to the designated lots, not the county road shoulder. On a hot Saturday those lots fill.
Up the river, when Wish Poosh is full
The lake is the bottom of a corridor. Two more Forest Service campgrounds sit above it on the Cle Elum River — Cle Elum River Campground at the head of the lake, 14 sites plus a group site for 100, and Salmon La Sac at the top of the road with 69 sites at 2,400 feet. Both run late May to mid-September, and both, unlike Wish Poosh, have potable water. Fees and elevations are in our Kittitas County camping guide. A standing district order requires reservations rather than walk-ups on the Cooper River side of Salmon La Sac and at the group sites, so check which loop you are booking.
Fishing at Lake Cle Elum
The rules here differ from Kachess in ways that catch people out, and the differences are not intuitive for two reservoirs 15 miles apart.
Per WDFW, the lake holds brook trout, brown trout, burbot, lake trout, mountain whitefish, rainbow trout, sockeye salmon and westslope cutthroat, and fishing season is open year-round.
The specifics:
- Two-pole fishing is allowed — the opposite of Kachess, where it is not. Same corridor, same agency, different rule.
- Kokanee and sockeye carry a 9-inch minimum and a 15-inch maximum. That slot was set in 2015 to protect migrating juvenile sockeye and the adults holding before fall spawning. The lake is no longer stocked with kokanee; the sockeye restoration program replaced that.
- The 5-trout daily limit includes kokanee, rainbow and cutthroat. Other trout species have no minimum size.
- WDFW encourages anglers to harvest lake trout, which are non-native here and eat juvenile sockeye. It is a fair-to-good lake trout fishery, with fish up to 20 pounds reported and deep trolling or jigging in spring and early summer the usual approach.
A Washington license is required, as on all public water. Our guide to fishing near Easton covers the corridor's lakes together, our Yakima River fishing guide covers the river the whole system drains into, and if you are wondering why our own four lakes need no license, that is a private-water determination that stops at our property line.
The helix at the dam
Cle Elum Dam was built in 1933 without fish passage, which ended the salmon runs above it. That is changing, and the engineering is unusual enough to be worth knowing when you are standing there. A first-in-the-nation helix structure — a spiral that lets juvenile salmon descend safely past the dam into the river — was completed in July 2024, according to Washington's Department of Ecology. Planning began in 2010 and construction was under way by 2015. The companion upstream facility, which moves adult fish back above the dam, was "expected to open in late 2026 or early 2027."
The project opens access to 30 miles of river habitat, and Ecology states it "is projected to help increase sockeye return into the Yakima Basin fivefold, from 20,000 to 100,000 each year." Credit for the reintroduction belongs to the Yakama Nation, which spent years putting sockeye back into this water before the passage existed to support them — and it is the reason the kokanee slot limit above is written the way it is.
What the 2026 fire closure still covers
The Three Queens Fire reshaped access across this district in 2026, and the closure has been shrinking rather than lifted. The current order — number 06-17-03-2026-45 — "is effective October 1, 2026 and will remain in effect through October 31, 2026, unless rescinded sooner," and the reduction specifically "provides more access to the north end of Cle Elum Lake." Still closed by name: Owhi Campground and Owhi Boat Launch, the Mineral Creek, Rachel Lake and Pete Lake trailheads, 23 trails including a segment of the Pacific Crest Trail, and eight forest roads.
Two cautions. The Wish Poosh, Speelyi Beach, Cle Elum River and Salmon La Sac pages were all still displaying a "Site Closed — 2026 Three Queens Fire" banner, last updated in August, well after the October reduction — site pages lag the orders, and the order and its map are the controlling documents. And that order expires at the end of this month, so check the forest's alerts page for the weekend you are actually going rather than this page. We track the wilderness side of the same closure in our Alpine Lakes Wilderness guide.
In late October the camping question is academic anyway. Nothing up that road reopens until late May.
Lake Cle Elum, Kachess, Lake Easton, or here
All three reservoirs are within half an hour of each other, and they are not interchangeable.
Lake Cle Elum is the largest and the least developed on its shore: one small campground with portable toilets and no water, a free beach, a ramp that goes dry in early July, and a salmon restoration project at the dam. Go for the beach and the kayaking in June and July, not for a boat trip in August. Lake Kachess is deeper and closer to us, with a far larger forest campground and flush toilets, an $11 day-use fee no federal pass covers, and a launch that lasts a few weeks longer. Lake Easton State Park is much smaller and shallower with a 10-horsepower limit, but it has hookup sites, a paved launch that opens in April, and a 5.2-mile trail loop.
We are a private 54-acre property at 3000 U-Fish Rd off I-90 Exit 63, open year-round, where the four lakes are small, warm, stocked, need no fishing license, and are never drawn down for anyone's orchard. Free kayaks and paddle boats come with a stay, there are cabins, a 14-person lodge, 22 full-hookup RV sites and tent camping, and Seattle is about 80 minutes west.
If you want the forest campground experience on a big reservoir, take it — $22 a night is a price we cannot touch. What we are good for is the eight months those gates are locked, the weekends when Speelyi Beach is full, and the mornings when nobody wants to drive another 25 minutes to swim. The town at the bottom of that road is covered in our guide to things to do in Cle Elum, Roslyn is a few minutes past it, and the rest of what there is to do nearby is on our activities page.