Goose Lake Plateau — Sunday, Nov. 10, 2019

Ethan, Brenda, Jonah, & I took a hike in the Potholes today.  We were going to hike the area from Pillar to Hampton Lakes, but found that the Wildlife Refuge was closed from Oct 1 to May 1 except for the Crab Creek & Rimrock trails, so we chose the Goose Lakes Plateau, which is on WDFW land, as our alternative.  The clouds were thick & low and it was cold when we arrived at the Crab Creek-Rimrock parking area. We climbed onto the plateau and walked west to a large butte and climbed to the top for marvelous views all around.  We then descended into the main coulee here and walked west to the large, open junction of 4 coulees.  From here we continued west looking for the little coulee coming up from Lower Goose Lake that I had come up in 2102.  When we came to a fork, we went right, hoping to make a loop back up the coulee from Lower Goose Lake, but ended up way too far north.  It finally started to clear off about noon and we were able to find a nice spot in the sun for lunch.  Afterwards we generally retraced our steps back to the car except that we walked the coulee down to the road rather than going across the bench.  We didn't see any other hikers and only heard a few distant gunshots from bird hunters.  But we did see wildlife:  deer, various raptors, an owl, a couple a flights of snow geese and some big groups of Canada geese, ravens, and even heard a canyon wren.