For todays winter hike(s), I visited the Lake Creek Coulee north of Odessa and southwest of Davenport, in other words in the middle of nowhere. The Bureau of Land Management (the real BLM) is responsible for thousands of acres of semi-desert steppe in the area around the coulee including a couple of recreation areas on striking scabland lakes.
To get to this hidden gem I had to drive over two hours west through farmland that looks a lot like Kansas. The areas of central Washington that were not scoured to bedrock by the ice age floods are some of the most productive agricultural lands in the country. Out here you can drive for hours without hardly ever seeing a car or another human.
My first stop was Coffee Pot Lake, a large scabland lake with a small campground and boat ramp just off of the paved road.
From the parking lot I was able to take a short walk over a small headland for a view of the main body of the lake. There were thousands of wild geese all along the shore and in the middle of the open water. I was surprised that most of the lake was ice free. It turned out the lake is deep, eighty feet in some spots and wider than most scabland lakes.
After checking out the day use area, I drove back up the entrance road to a small parking area that accessed the trail above the bluffs on the north side of the lake.
The unmarked trail started out as a double track that looked like it was used for cattle operations. It stayed away from the shear cliffs that bordered the lake at first. Mostly it meandered through sage brush and the tall grass.
A small basalt ridge covered in green lichen paralleled the trail to the north screening the trail from the paved road north of the site.
About half a mile in a short spur brought me to the edge of the cliffs above the lake. It was about two hundred feet straight down from this point. The surface of the lake was covered by thousands of geese all making a thunderous racket with their incessant honking.
To the west down the coulee another lake was separated from Coffee Pot by a low isthmus of dry land. The lower lake is actually seasonally part of Coffee Pot and much sallower.
I continued west off trail along the cliffs using cattle paths and finding openings in the sage brush.
A mile in I came to my turn around point above the isthmus from here I could see the lower lake was indeed frozen as was the far west end of the main lake. I got to watch a coyote hunting below me. He was too far away to get a decent photo of.
On the way back I came across this skull of some unfortunate animal. It is the circle of life.
On the way back I took the spur to the cliff again to soak in the views. Some of these basalt cliffs are beyond vertical. Coffee Pot Lake is listed at over 800 acres making it one of the bigger lakes in the scablands.
Looking back to the west the scene looked like it could have been from the high Artic summer with the dramatic cliffs, patches of ice, little vegetation and thousands of screaming birds.
So after walking maybe three miles along the cliffs, I returned to the parking area and drove a few miles to another BLM recreational site, this time on Twin Lakes.
A long gravel road eventually descended back in to Lake Creek Coulee to a site with a small camp ground, fishing dock and day use parking between two smaller but beautiful lakes.
Time was getting short so I parked and checked out both lakes. Both of them were frozen solid.
A small creek connected the lakes right at the day use area. It was the only open water around.
I checked out the lower lake first. According to topo maps it is very shallow maxing out at about ten feet deep. It was still very pretty. I tossed a couple of small rocks out on the smooth black ice to see how far they would slide.
Some day soon I would like to come back with my kayaks. Both of these lakes looked well worth exploring.
By now I only had a hour or so in my time budget to explore so I crossed a makeshift foot bridge over the connecting creek and followed a trail on the south side of the upper lake. Across the way was a small waterfall that created its own small area of open water. I could hear the sound of the falling water as it hit the lake.
The trail looked like it could have been a little better maintained as it skirted a small ice covered pond. Fortunately it is easy to go off trail in the scablands as long as it’s cold enough to keep the rattlers in their dens.
According to my research the upper lake is quite a bit deeper with a hole around sixty feet deep. At the northeast end of the lake they’re a couple of mature ponderosa pines to break up the grasslands.
Before I called it a day I stopped for one last photo of the upper lake. This is when I saw the first other people in my entire trip. I man and his son set up camp and then set up an ice fishing tent on the ice. They say black ice is the safest to walk on but still sixty feet is a long way down.
I spent more time driving to and from the lakes than i did hiking today. It was still well worth the effort. I had no idea these lakes existed until I researched locations for winter hikes in the Inland Northwest. When I make it back a camping trip and kayaking will be on the agenda. If you want to go shoot for early spring when its still cool and the snakes aren’t active.
