Yakima Sportsman State Park and onwards north and east

We booked to stay at Yakima Sportsman State Park just one night. When we were making the reservation, we studied the map of the campground, considered how warm it was going to be, tried to think about where shade might be available, and selected site 26. When we got to the campground and looked at the site, the branches of the tree next to the site were quite low and would have dragged on Gracie's side as we backed into the site. We called the ranger station, told him we were at the site and the problem we saw, and asked if there was another site that we could use instead - we only needed it for one night. He suggested site 24. We could see it from where we had stopped, could see that there were no trees anywhere around it -- so no overhanging branches, but also no shade - it would be fine for one night.

Gracie and the Jee-rage in site 24 on Monday morning. One thing different about this state park compared to most public parks is that it had full hookups. In our experience, most public parks have, at most, water and electric with a centralized dump station - some have electric only and water faucets at various places where you can go to fill your fresh tanks. Some have no hookups at all, but may have a dump station with a water fill. Since we had just spent two weeks at Chehalis with no sewer hookup, we were glad to be able to empty our tanks and do a few loads of laundry. (We could have dumped before leaving Chehalis, but decided to travel with relatively full waste tanks as the "agitation" of driving will possibly allow them to dump more completely.)

Imagine our surprise on Monday morning to see that site 26, the site we had reserved, now had a large branch down on it...

... looking into the site from the perspective of how we would have backed in -- the branch totally covered the front of the site, and almost certainly would have been at least partially on top of the Jeep had we parked in the site. We were *so* grateful that the low hanging branches had us choose to change sites!

From Yakima, we drove north toward Ellensburg. Around Yakima, the hills were very yellow/brown with what looked to be grasses dead from the heat. As we came over the last hill, the vista opened up into the Kittitas Valley, an agricultural region in this area east of the Cascades and west of the Columbia River. From what I've read, the area produces a lot of Timothy hay.

We headed a bit further east and a little north to another Thousand Trails campground, Crescent Bar. This is near Quincy, Washington, and right on the Columbia River. The cliffs along the river are so interesting looking...

... it was a cloudy day, so the river was not too impressive looking. There were a lot of folks out boating and using various water equipment (jet skis, stand up paddle boards, etc.) as the temperatures were over 100F.

Tuesday morning at our site in Crescent Bar. We have a partial view out our front window of the Columbia River...

We walked out to the overlook and Carl took a panorama picture - the color was more beautiful in the morning.

We plan to be at Crescent Bar for a week. It is supposed to get a little cooler (highs in the 90s). As people keep on saying, "But, it's a dry heat!" -- of course, your oven has a dry heat, and most people don't want to live in there either...