Coho Campground, part 4

August, 2017

I think this post is a little out of order, but I don’t care. 🙂

The day before I was going to head home with the trailer in tow, I realized that I had been driving up and down back woods Forest Service roads all week and I needed to fill the gas tank in the truck.  (I do have another post to share with you about those Forest Service roads so this definitely is out of order, but I’ll share this post with you now anyway.)  If I waited to get gas until I was leaving the area with the trailer in tow, I feared not being able to find a gas station with at least 10 feet of roof clearance, which would mean I’d have to park somewhere and unhitch the trailer to get gas.  And, the nearest gas station to the campground was back down the hill in Montesano, at least an hour away.

So on this particularly gorgeous lazy day, I jumped in the big white truck (sans trailer) and took a slow, meandering drive down the hill to Montesano to get gas, and then wandered slowly back up to Coho Campground.  At the beginning of the week with the trailer in tow, on the way up to the campground, it took me almost an hour to get from Montesano to the campground.  Today, with no trailer in tow, it took me almost two hours each way because I kept stopping and taking photographs.  People say, “oh you can go much faster without the trailer in tow.”  Ha! they don’t know me.

Photos below are in no particular order … just photos of a very wonderful country road and some critters who live there.

Notice there is almost no shoulder on this stretch of the road.  Most of the road between Montesano and Lake Wynoochee was like this, although some portions of the road didn’t have even this much shoulder … just a ditch immediately adjacent to the pavement.  When I had the trailer in tow, I simply drove slowly and carefully.

“Oh my gosh, a big white truck!  What should I do?!  Go left!  Go right!  Go left!  Aiiii!”
Obviously, I stopped the truck until she decided which direction to go, but she was a pretty cute dancing deer there for awhile.

GHFD stands for Grays Harbor Fire District.  Grays Harbor is an extremely large saltwater bay on the Washington coast of the Pacific Ocean just a few miles west of Montesano.  There are a number of small towns around the bay, but most of the area is only lightly settled by humans.  The Grays Harbor area will be a terrific RV-ing destination itself one of these days.  Evidently, at least part of the Lake Wynoochee area is inside the Grays Harbor Fire District.  I bet there are a couple of big red fire trucks inside this building.

You might notice the road marker in front of the fire station in the photo above.  I didn’t understand the road markers here.  This one says “1393”.  They were in numerical order, but this road certainly was not 1,393 miles long!  By the time I got down to Montesano, I’d forgotten all about the road markers so didn’t notice whether they continued past Montesano and didn’t think to ask.

Hay baled in plastic wrap.

Oh, gosh, all of these bales of hay reminded me of something I learned on that recent day-trip up over Snoqualmie Pass during the smoke and ash of the wildfires, but forgot to tell you about in that post.  While on the freeway going up to and then coming back down from the Pass that day, I saw six HUGE trailer trucks loaded with bales of hay … all heading east into the areas where the wildfires were.  I researched that online after I got home to learn that farmers in western Washington (and likely western Canada and Oregon and California too) where no wildfires had damaged crops … the farmers who had even the smallest amount of extra hay were donating it to farmers and cattle ranchers east of the mountains whose entire fields and stored hay had been burned.  They were trucking it over the mountains to them at no cost to the ranchers who had lost their entire source of food for their cattle.  I read the same was being done for Montana ranchers, and the same had been done earlier in the year when wildfires raged throughout the midwest.  This year was a tough year all around.

Well-fed cattle in the Wynoochee River valley.

This was a funny part of the road.  The photo is level.  The telephone poles were actually guy-wired at that angle.  I wonder why.

I was almost back to the campground in the photo above.  I still had enough pie to last me the rest of the week so I didn’t buy more when I was in Montesano getting gas … but I had thought about it!