Columbia National Wildlife Refuge - Rimrock Lake — Saturday, Apr. 11, 2015

Central Washington > Potholes Region

I led my first Sagebrush Ramble of the season for the Cascadians on this windy, partly cloudy day. We started out on the Crab Creek Interpretive Trail. This trail runs above the creek for a while, then descends to creek level. This junction is not marked and we just kept walking straight ahead on a boot trail. We eventually realized our mistake and found an easy way down to the official trail. We then walked back to the trailhead and set out on the Frog Lake Trail. We stopped at all the interpretive signs, walked past the now dry Frog Lake, and climbed up onto the mesa with views out over the lakes of the Columbia NWR. We found a nice spot just over the rim out of the wind for lunch. After an hour or so, instead of following the trail on around the rim of the mesa, we dropped down the east side of the mesa and picked up the service road that runs from Soda Lake to Upper Hampton Lake. We walked down to Upper Hampton Lake and then followed game trails west over the uplands to the main Crab Creek Coulee. We found an easy way down through the cliffs and walked back through sagebrush and grasslands to the Frog Lake Trail (there was marsh between us and the Marsh Loop Trail) and back to the truck. We were mostly protected from the worst of the wind and saw lots of waterbirds and even a couple of cranes circling overhead. There was quite a bit of long-leaf phlox, larkspur, and balsamroot in bloom. We only saw a few other people out, mostly at a distance down by the lakes. The views of the many lakes, buttes, mesas, and coulees was magnificent.