COWICHE CANYON HIKE

Pronounced “COW EECHIE”, we would hike one of the trails in the Canyon. The trail we chose is at the very top in this photo, and the mileage for each of the trails is listed on the left side in the yellow box.

End to end, the COWICHE Trail is 2.9 miles. We each knew that we were not up for a near 6 mile hike today so we turned around at about the 2 mile point and returned.

Some random photos as we hiked.

I needed to make sure we were going the right way.

Some color was out, and I got Janice & Rosalie in the midst of the red “shining sumak”.

This looks so much like cotton. It is Western Clamatis, but I started humming to … “when them cotton balls get a rotten you can’t pick very much cotton…” every time I saw them.

We hike on and some make their way around strewn rockery to see what is around the next bend in the trail.

Rosalie needed to get her cooling scarf wet so she took a detour down to the river.

I couldn’t resist this old ringer type washing machine near the trailhead.

We ended our hike with about 4 miles for most of us and a mile or so less for a couple. It was hot in the desert canyon, and getting dusty, so we were happy to be done! Back at camp Susan and I packed up the van and all our gear for departure for home after having dinner out with everyone.

Our original plan was to stay here until Wednesday (tomorrow) and drive nearly 6 hours to Hope, BC for our next SOTF outing. We would rather drive 2.5 hours home today and have about 3+ tomorrow, so we will do just that.

There was one big negative thing about camping here. The campground is on the east side of Yakima which is the ‘seedier’ side with lots of homeless folks and those challenged with poverty. When we each entered the campground the Ranger warned us to keep our bikes well hidden as there are thieves with bolt cutters who come by in the night and steal any bike or mode of transportation they see. Locks of any kind are not safe as the cutters have cut through it all.

We have locks and we have a sound alarm for our bikes, but even with those we were not comfortable to leave them out. So we kept them inside our small, already crowded van that made us (especially me) feel like sardines in a can. Two nights of struggling, squeezing and manipulating my body around bikes were enough. This made the decision to leave for home today easier to make.

One more time with the Sisters at dinner and we said our good byes: “see ya down the road”.