Potholes Reservoir Kayaking

April 2003

Wanting to finally get out camping and paddling, we had planned a trip to the Washington Coast and a paddle at Willapa Bay but the weather would not cooperate so we had to go East into the middle of the desert in order to kayak.   We loaded up our Feathercraft foldable kayaks into our new Fiamm carry box and got on I-90 hoping for sun and low wind.  This trip was kind of a test-run with the new gear as we have a longer trip planned to kayak the Northern California coast sometime in the summer. 

Our first stop was outside of Quincy to hike up to Ancient Lake, a small seep lake along with three others in the Quincy Wildlife area.  It was a nice short hike into the lakes where we saw this waterfall, a beaver hard at work, and lots of water birds.   Mayflies were hatching off the lakes but no trout were to be found, it looks like the DNR had just poisoned out the lakes recently.    This area has a lot to explore, more lakes further down the trail, lots of wide open sage fields, basalt cliffs, and big skies.

At Potholes State Park the first step was to set up camp and get the kayaks put together.  Here is Catherine loaded up with the kayak still in the backpack ready to walk over to a grassy field to put the boats together.    This was the first boat assembly in a while so it took us an hour to get two of them together, we are practicing to get down to the 20 minute assembly time that Feathercraft advertises.  Below is the van with box and the assembled boats at our campsite:

The next day we took a long paddle up the west shore of the reservoir through many marsh areas and around many islands.  We were warned to take the GPS unit along and were glad we did, the upper end of Potholes Reservoir is a total maze of small islands, marshes, and channels you weave through.  There were countless water birds in the area, I think we ended up seeing 25 different species in the three days of the trip.   Here's Catherine in her boat:

After about 4-5 miles of paddling we found a small beach to land on in a cove.  We saw several high dunes close by and decided to hike up to them only to find out we were not on the mainland but on a bigger island that had a marsh cutting our access to the dunes to the south.  There was one large dune to the north so we headed that direction and found we could climb it to get a good vantage point for lunch and to see just where we were in the maze.  Below is the view back down the lake to the launch from on top of the dune:

Later that day we hiked up the Frenchman's Wasteway until we ran into some serious tick issues and turned back.  I did a bit of bass fishing near the campground without success but the water was a bit too cold still for good bass fishing.  The next day we paddled up the far channel of the Frenchman's Wasteway as far as we could before heavy current turned us back and then explored the marshes on the lower end of the lake as there was a bass tournament with about 200 boats racing around in the main lake.  On the way home we stopped in Ellensburg and hiked up the Umptanum Canyon for about 3 miles where we saw a porcupine up close sleeping in a tree.