Steve Giordano - Camping Washington: A Comprehensive Guide to Public Tent and RV Campgrounds

Camping Washington

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Camping Washington

A Comprehensive Guide to Public Tent and RV Campgrounds

Third Edition

Steve Giordano and Lynn Rosen

An imprint of Globe Pequot Press

Falcon and FalconGuides are registered trademarks and Make Adventure Your Story is a trademark of Rowman & Littlefield.

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2013, 2017 by Rowman & Littlefield

Previously published in 2000 by Falcon Publishing, Inc.

All photos by Steve Giordano and Lynn Rosen unless otherwise noted.

Maps Rowman & Littlefield

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Giordano, Steve, 1941

Rosen, Lynn, 1942

Camping Washington: A Comprehensive Guide to Public Tent and RV Campgrounds / Steve Giordano and Lynn RosenThird edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7627-7800-3 (pbk.)

1. CampingWashington (State)Guidebooks. 2. Washington (State)Guidebooks. I. Title.

GV191.42.W2G56 2013

917.97'068dc23

2012036901

ISBN 978-1-4930-2676-0 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4930-2677-7 (e-book)

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

The authors and Rowman & Littlefield assume no liability for accidents happening to, or injuries sustained by, readers who engage in the activities described in this book.

Contents

Overview

Acknowledgments

We could not have written this book without the extreme cooperation of the many public agencies that operate campground facilities in Washington State. These include the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission, the USDA Forest Service, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the Washington Department of Natural Resources, the National Park Service, and many municipalities and public utility districts. The help of their staffs was invaluable. Special thanks to the Cowlitz Valley Station and Mount Adams Ranger Station for their help in the face of many closures due to storm damage.

We also owe great appreciation to Steves parents, Roy and Jeanne Giordano, for getting him started properly on a lifetime of camping. In the early days, their equipment consisted of three war-surplus mummy bags, period. They slept on the beach or, better yet, among the sand dunes, with Steve in the middle. Equipment added through the years, including a tent and a stove, seemed like luxuries, and they still do today. We must confess, though, that the western Washington climate fairly calls out for an RVthey had theirs until recent years and we have ours.

We must also credit our FalconGuides editors, David Legere and Julie Marsh, for guiding Camping Washington to completion. They entertained our never-ending questions and suggestions with good humor and gave us solid solutions. Any mistakes in the book are ours, and they get the credit for the way it works with you the reader in mind.

Happy camping!

Olympic National Parks, Ozette and Mora on the Olympic Peninsula, are close to Crescent Lake where the historic Lake Crescent Lodge is located. This lodge and its Roosevelt Cabins are an ideal base for enjoying the Olympic National Park. Lake Crescent affords a beautiful setting for kayakers, boaters, and anglers.

Introduction

The popular image of Washington State, outside of the Pacific Northwest, is of a rain-soaked wilderness somewhere near Alaska. People know of Seattle, its high-tech Starbucks coffee and industries like Amazon, Expedia, Costco, Boeing, and Microsoft, but they also tend to think the state is chock-full of mountains and forests with a few roads cut through the trees. In some parts of the state, that is true. For example, the famed North Cross State Highway, now known as the North Cascades Highway, opened as recently as 1972. However, it closes every winter, usually from November to March or April, because the mountain snows get too deep to plow and early-spring avalanches still cover the highway. Washington has about 81,300 miles of federal, state, and local roads, including 757 miles of interstate highway. Federal lands make up nearly 30 percent of the states 71,300 square miles.

In 1942, when the immense Bonneville Dam and Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River were completed, the Bonneville Power Administration produced a movie for Pacific Northwest residents in rural areas. The film encouraged them to electrify their homes and farms with the dams newly generated power. Folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote twenty-six songs for the movie, for about $10 per song. The most famous of them is Roll On, Columbia, Roll On.

Washingtons mountains lack the height of the Rockies, but they excel by any standard of grandeur. Swift-moving streams fall away on all sides, rock walls jut straight up from the roadside, forest canopy hangs entirely over the road in some places, and in fall the changing of the leaves in the mountain passes creates a near-neon glow.

The scale of the mountains is enormous, their contrasting terrain is striking, their gorges and river valleys seem sculpted by giants, and their perpetually snow- and ice-covered peaks appear as beacons to everyone within 100 miles.

Western Washingtons rain, in spite of its distressing reputation, is not really all that heavy. Seattle gets about 38 inches per yearless than New York City. In the rain shadow of the Olympic Peninsula, the town of Sequim (pronounced skwim) gets nearly 17 inches of rain per year, and some of the San Juan Islands get around 22 inches per year. Cactus grows on at least one of the islands. Of course, the mountains that cause this dryness, the Olympics, absorb the southwesterly brunt of Pacific storms and receive up to 160 inches of rain per year. A two-story rain gauge behind the Quinault Lodge in Olympic National Forest measures the rainfall in FEET!