I kind of like pulling into a strange town, middle of nowhere, that I have no idea what the town name means, or how it is even pronounced. Cle Elum is a non-stoplight town (as the mayor proclaims in his ‘welcome’ section of the free newspaper) and was built as a logging town, later coal mining, and was a stop on the westward roll of the Northern Pacific Railway. The town was pretty much wiped out from a fire in 1918, which destroyed 29 square blocks of buildings. Only one building remains from that era.
