Twin Lakes, Washington — Community Curved Around the Water

Twin Lakes lies on the Colville Reservation in southern Ferry County, where two neighboring lakes provide an obvious center in otherwise dispersed forest country.

Homes and cabins follow roads around the water rather than gathering around a commercial district. Fishing and recreation matter, but the lakes are also simply where people live.

The broader region has been home to Indigenous families for generations, and modern settlement around Twin Lakes remains part of the reservation's rural landscape.

A conventional street grid would make little sense here. Shoreline, forest and terrain already decided where roads could go.

Twin Lakes is a community shaped like its geography: spread out, wooded and wrapped around the water.