Twin Lakes

What a wonderful day!!!!! I got up early and went to church to sing in two services with the Women's Choir (had a solo bit). The sermon was excellent (the swing towards fascism that our country is taking thanks to Bush, Cheney, and Haliburton). Hey, it is a Unitarian church, what do you expect. I then hooked up with a guy that I will be doing some singing with in a few weeks with a bunch of other people. I get to do some improve-skat stuff which will be fun: music from the Broadway show Hairspray. Then I took off and picked up my buddy Gar for some fun out in the open air.

One of the Twin Lakes: Photo borrowed from Trailjunky at NWHikers.net

In my last post I mentioned driving around the Central Washington desert and we headed back out towards Harrington today to Twin Lakes. What a damn great walk. I did not take my camera so the picture I have here was borrowed from a trail report on NWHiker.net. The hike is in the Best Desert Hiking Washington that I just got and Gar has been out there several times in the summer.

We got to the road into the wildlife area and decided to just park and walk because of the snow and the mud. Ok, Gar wanted to try it but I would not go for it. We were in my Festiva! After we parked and got down the road a ways he agreed that it would have been bad to drive down it because he would have ended up doing a lot of pushing.

The snow out there is as deep as it was a Fishtrap but someone had driven on the road a few times in a big 4WD so we were able to walk the road in the tracks. It is a little over two miles from the entrance down to the lake. Most of the way is in the sagebrush covered scabby flats and then drops way down to the lake which is surrounded by basalt cliffs. The two lakes are connected by a creek. There are camping spots down there and Gar has spent the night there a couple of times. There are trails all over the place including an almost 10 mile loop trail. It would not have been much fun to hike through the snow because it was so deep and heavy but going on the road was not bad. It rained on us the first hour, but not too hard. This is totally an area that I want to go back to in the spring and Gar told me about a nice area near a creek that would be perfect for a backpack. I slept out in the desert for a week once and it was so cool at night. The stars were more amazing than in the mountains because the horizon all around is clear. I want to do that again.

Walter did not accompany us because he has come down with a little case of coccidiosis. Nasty blighter, that is. It started the evening after our little walk out at Fishtrap and I was sort of worried (ok, that is an understatement) that I took him out too soon after his surgery even though the surgeon said I only had to wait two weeks. The blood in his stool really freaked me out a bit but Nancy diagnosed it correctly at once (as she said, working at an animal shelter in Mexico she has seen "shit piles" of it). He is much better today, but still had to stay home and take it easy.

I will be very glad when the snow is gone and the plants start to sprout and the flowers start to bloom. I spent many years working out in the deserts of Washington, Idaho and Oregon when I was an archaeologist and fell in love with the landscape. The book I bought has tons of hikes in it that I have never known of, and info on areas I know but never knew how to access. I want to do some more while the snow melts in the mountains. After all, I still can't find my snow shoes.