WINTHROP, Wash. — At night, Rachel Evans nestles under a canvas tepee in the Methow Valley, a spot so pastoral she can hear her Norwegian fjord horse gently breathing.

By day, she directs research and development at a thriving dot-com.

That a 25-year-old sleeps in a tepee and works for a high-tech company is not surprising. What's groundbreaking, literally, is the location of her employer, HomeMovie .com, just up the road in the Western-theme town of Winthrop, Wash., population 351.

Though well-known for its human-powered recreation (hiking, mountain biking, cross-country skiing), the glacial valley around this town is cut off from the rest of the state by the jagged geography of mountains and hardscrabble steppe. When winter closes the North Cascades Highway, this is beyond the end of the road.

It's more than three hours by car to the nearest freeway exit, two hours to movie theaters and shopping malls. It's a place where, as late as 2001, folks in certain canyons were struggling to get phone service — four hours from Seattle, a centurywide gap in telecommunications.

No more. These days, fiber-optic cables run like a river down the valley. Microwave towers beam data from peak to peak.

The Methow Valley, along with the rest of rural Washington, is now wired. The same technology that makes it possible to outsource to India and the Philippines is changing the labor landscape closer to home. Thanks to broadband, specks on the map now have the potential to be cyber kingdoms and server farms, data portals and telecommuting perches.

Companies that once looked across the Pacific for cheap tech labor are starting to set up shop in unexpected rural locales. It's less expensive than doing business in American cities, they say, without the language or culture hurdles often found overseas.

In Winthrop, on the slopes of Patterson Mountain, there's a new call center with 25 employees, NCTeleserv, set up by businessman George Dale, who had previously built call centers in the Philippines and India. "Companies moved overseas because there was a big price break," Dale says. "The trend now is bringing business back to the U.S. primarily because customers are not happy."

You no longer need to reside in a cyber city or suburb to be part of the tech workforce. Translators, radiologists and accountants who had always dreamed of country living are moving to 20 acres and telecommuting at high speeds. Locals once limited to nearby low-wage work and shrinking forestry jobs are reinventing themselves as broadband entrepreneurs.

"You're talking about an economic base that wasn't here before," says Maria Converse, who, with husband Jeff Hardy runs Methownet.com, one of the valley's three Internet service providers for a population of 5,000.

To be sure, a few pockets in the valley — and the state — still have only dial-up connections. Long stretches of fiber remain dark, like pipes with no water, because Internet service providers haven't yet lit them. And even where broadband is widely available, not everyone has the know-how or equipment to make use of it.

Still, many call the spread of high-speed Internet the most radical redefinition of the workplace since the Industrial Revolution.

"It's a restructuring of rural places," says Bill Gillis, director of the Center to Bridge the Digital Divide at Washington State University. "Accomplished professionals are moving into rural areas, and young, educated people are not having to move away. There's a stronger tax base, and this feeds into schools and public services.

"Ideally in a global world, people have choices about where they want to live and work — whether that would be Queen Anne Hill or a wheat field or the Methow. Broadband enables the opportunity. It doesn't necessarily guarantee the result."