For todays hike, I headed an hour or so through and past Spokane to check out the Columbia Plateau Trail, specifically the section from the Amber Lake trailhead towards the north.
Last year I took a short hike on the Columbia Plateau Trail from the end of the pavement outside of Cheney Washington into the Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge. At the time I felt like I didn’t have enough photos or information on this trail to make a post. The unpaved part of the trail started at a trailhead off of Cheney Spangle Road.
The first mile of the trail passes through farm and ranch land before crossing under Cheney Plaza Road and entering the wildlife refuge.
Turnbull Wildlife Refuge is about 23,000 acres and covers a portion of the channeled scablands, a geological area in Eastern Washington created by ice age floods that stripped the soil away and left numerous narrow lakes in coulees. The section I hiked passed by several small lakes and through low cuts blasted through the basalt.
In the area excavated I notice this striking radial design around a small hole. Once you see one of these, you can’t un-see them. These were created by blasting the rocks so the basalt could be more easily removed. Once I saw it, I noticed dozens more through out the cuts.
This line, The Spokane Portland and Seattle was built in 1905 and operated for eighty plus years. The 130 miles between Spokane and Pasco are now owned by the State of Washington and maintained as a public trail.
That was last summer. Today I was looking for a place for a winter hike with limited or no snow and open scenery so I could stay in the sunshine, so I decided to check out another section of this trail.
It took me over a hour to drive to the Amber Lake Trailhead. All of the trailheads require the Discover Pass to use so I used mine. In addition to providing access to the trail there is also a place to launch kayaks or canoes on this pretty little lake.
Like most lakes in the Channeled Scablands, Amber Lake is long and narrow and oriented from the northeast to the southwest in the direction the ancient flood waters presumably flowed. Being late January the lake as to be expected was iced over.
Near the northeast end of the lake, the old railroad bed ran through a cut right next to it.
Soil and rock from the cut was used to create an embankment along part of the lake shore.
Beyond Amber Lake the rail bed curved towards another of these cuts through the basalt. Scattered Ponderosa Pines were the dominate tree species along the trail.
That and birch trees. What looked like frost was actually the last of Decembers snow that had not yet melted in the shade of the rock walls.
Around a bend was a tunnel, kind of. This is a recent addition to avoid crossing one of the only paved roadways in the area, Mullinex Road.
Even in a newer and very remote tunnel, the lowlife vandals have been hard at work degrading the experience for everyone. Thanks scumbags! Even though it wasn’t an original railroad tunnel it was still kind of neat to walk through.
Past the tunnel the cuts through the basalt got a little bigger. You have to be impressed with the work it took to make this railroad a hundred and twenty years ago.
This rock wall shows how the cooling lava created basalt columns. A patch of ice at the bottom is a seepage of ground water.
Between the cuts through the basalt the trail passed by numerous small ponds all frozen.
Beyond the trials crossing with Stirling Road the old railbed ran on top of a small embankment between wetlands. This is were I called it good and turned around.
Once back at the parking lot I took a short walk to get a good look at the part of the lake southwest of the trailhead. I decided to make one more detour before I made the drive home.
Just seven miles or so southeast the Columbia Plateau Trail kind of ends at Williams Lake Road just inside Lincoln County. I’ve always found the correlation between trees and the Spokane County line kind of interesting. Spokane County gets drier the further east you head but has Ponderosa Pines right up to the county line. As soon as you cross into Lincoln or Adams counties there are almost no trees.
South of Lake Williams Road the trail reverts to a rough surface of old railroad ballast and isn’t really suitable for even fat tired bikes. In fact its kind of hard to walk on. Only real adventures explore the eighty mile long section from here to Franklin County. Also I understand that several road crossings and high trestle bridges are closed and their are no practical detours around them.
However just across the road from the trailhead there was this epic piece of early twentieth century engineering. This was the largest railroad embankment I’ve ever came across and I couldn’t resist checking it out.
It was well over a mile across a coulee I couldn’t find the name of on this massive earthen berm. It is difficult to impart the scale of this marvel. Quick math gave me a ball park guess that upwards of half a million cubic yards of rock and dirt were used to create it.
Halfway across I could see the barren terraces were I’m guessing all of this fill came from over a hundred and twenty years ago. I’m guessing this embankment was over seventy feet above the coulee floor and tapered from thirty feet wide at the top to well over a hundred feet wide at the bottom.
Looking up the coulee I could see Down Lake with Mica Peak Washington in the far distance almost forty miles away.
After forty five minutes I made it to the other side of the coulee. Now there was nothing left to do but return to the trailhead. The sun was getting pretty low on the horizon and the scablands are lonely country.
I took a last look at this giant causeway and called it a day. I would call both the section of the trail southeast of Amber Lake and the massive embankment hidden gems in the Inland Northwest. It is an epic landscape indeed.
Exploring old abandoned railroads is one of my favorite things to do. This rail trail eventually crosses over the Palouse Cascade Trail anther thirty miles or so to the southwest. I guess I have more places to check out next spring.
