Goin’ Mobile, Crescent Bar/Ancient Lakes, 5.13.16 - 5.15.16
So, this is actually two tales in one. Let’s start with the decision for us to buy an RV. I’ve been tent camping for 58 years and I have loved almost every minute of it. With a tent and a four wheel drive vehicle, the world was my oyster and as I grew older, got married and had a child we spent countless nights enjoying the great outdoors with nothing but a thin piece of fabric between us and the elements. However, car camping and backpacking are two entirely different sports and when it came to car camping, two things began to get a little tiresome as I got older. Number one was that despite the fact that we have conquered countless diseases, taken man to the moon, put over 20,000 songs on a jukebox the size of a deck of cards, mankind can not seem to make an air mattress that will hold air for an entire night. Number two is that most car/tent camping has always been done in the summer months and that means hot temperatures and that means that by day two my steak is floating in ice water.
Given these troublesome burdens, Bridgit and I began weighing our options. I had always leaned towards a van conversion. I wanted something small enough to still allow us access to trailheads off dirt roads for hiking purposes. But when we looked at van conversions, they were very pricey for what you got. For the same amount of money you could get much more space, bells and whistles in an RV. I was dead set against that idea though for fear that they were all too big. The last thing I wanted to do was to spend the rest of my life stuck in some cheesy RV campground with tons of cool places to see all around and no way to get to them.
So we looked at towing but didn’t want to tow and didn’t have a vehicle to tow with. We looked at buying a camper slide on and a truck but didn’t like the configurations. We kept going back to a shorter RV and finally settled on a 25’ Winnebago Navion.
I was still not convinced we could go to the places I wanted to go but it truly was small enough to park almost anywhere so I bowed to the pressure (Bridgit) and we are now RVers. Don’t get me wrong - we are still backpackers and I will gladly sleep in my little backpacking tent and eat freeze dried dinners and filter my water from a cold mountain stream, but when we want to just go to a campground for a weekend of relaxation, we are now going in style!
The Navion
One interesting side note is that our friends Bob and Dana, with whom we have car camped with for the better part of 18 years and who have watched our air mattresses deflate and our ice melt from the cozy confines of their camper decided it was time to upgrade and they actually bought one for themselves. So with dual RVs, we waited out the winter months and are now taking them out to get familiar with them. Which brings us to the second part of this tale.
Have Navions, will travel
Last Friday we headed over Stevens Pass away from the lush greenery of western Washington to a place called Crescent Bar. Crescent Bar is a little oasis on the mighty Columbia River. In the heat of summer the place is overrun with party boats filled with testosterone charged dudesters and naked chicks getting hammered before heading downstream to the Gorge Amphitheater for various concerts that I’m too old to care about anymore.
But in early May, it is still a very quiet place and just right for some relaxation. With the RV purchase came 30 free nights at any Thousand Trails Campground so we pulled into the Crescent Bar RV Resort and found two nice spots right next to each other. The view was really great right from our site looking down the beautiful Columbia River with its towering cliffs. We had a great night cooking outside on our little Weber grills and with all the extra room I brought both guitars (6 and 12 string) and sang by the light of the moon.
The view from the Crescent Bar RV Resort. The actual Crescent Bar is off to the left where the tall trees are.
The next day we packed up Bob and Dana’s RV and drove over to the public beach. Plenty of room for parking (we were the only ones in the entire park). They own two kayaks so we took turns going for a paddle in the backwater between Crescent Bar and the huge cliffs on the east side of the Columbia. It was really cool back in there and there were several small islands with bird sanctuaries that we paddled around.
Bob in the backwater area
The following day we were faced with nothing to do. Here was my fear that we were relegated to being stuck in an RV resort but then I remembered that I had read about a cool place to go hiking fairly near Crescent Bar. Similar to the Grand Coulee and Steamboat Rock which I had reported on last year and in the same general area is a place called Ancient Lakes. Back in the ice age, there was a lake that stretched halfway across Montana created by a huge ice dam. When that dam broke up it caused a flood of almost biblical proportions that raced across eastern Washington as it gouged huge canyons, or coulees and left behind tons of lakes of every shape and size.
It was these lakes that I wanted to explore so this time we severed our ties to electricity and water, and drove our Navion up the highway up to the top of the mesas above the cliffs of the Columbia River to an entrance gate to Ancient Lakes State Park.
While it was all dirt roads from here, the RV had no trouble navigating them and we were amazed at all the lakes around every turn and tons of options for dry camping (RV camping with no hookups). We settled on a trailhead to Dusty Lake and set out to explore.
Dusty Lake from near the trailhead
First we began to follow a trail that began to drop down below some huge basalt column cliffs. Signs warned of poison ivy and a plethora of rattlesnakes but we bravely marched on. After dropping down to a small pond, we decided maybe the views would be better if we changed course and hiked up high along the top of the cliffs to overlook the lakes.
Bridgit, Dana and Bob watching me fend for myself among the rattlesnakes
It was the right choice staying up high. The trail petered out but it was easy hiking along the tops of the cliffs and the views looking down on Dusty Lake were indeed spectacular.
Dusty Lake
We followed the cliff edge until we came to a point that gave us a full view of Dusty Lake. It looked like a great place to camp by the lake. There was a stream that came out of another higher lake that formed a nice waterfall right near the shoreline. I would love to go back there in the fall when the lakes would be warmer for swimming. There were plenty of places to RV camp and days of exploration possibilities. THAT’S more of what I had in mind when we decided to upgrade. A more comfortable base camp that would still allow us to explore on foot. So this was a highly successful trip and it opened my eyes to even greater possibilities for camping options. Can’t wait for the next one!
Dusty Lake