Belfair State Park

What? The rains have paused. Let’s get out there.

April 13, 2016 By drpaddle 2 Comments

It was the wettest winter in history here in western Washington, but that didn’t stop us from curling up in front of the fireplace and TV and staying there for months.

But finally… three glorious, rain-free days were predicted. We jumped onto the washington.goingtocamp website and snagged a waterfront site at our “back yard” state park (Belfair — only 45 minutes from home). Toto emerged from the side yard, and enjoyed an extended spa treatment to remove his winter coat of green scum. And off to the park we went.

It really was a nice campsite. Quieter, of course, in mid-April, mid-week.

It wasn’t especially warm — mostly in the 50s — but careful chair positioning and strategic use of the portable fire pit kept us comfortable. Tyler and Wally were happy to engage in extensive napping inside the Toto. I fooled around a lot with a new camera (thanks, fambly, for the wonderful gift!).

Mornings brought fog to the Hood Canal. Or fog brought the mornings. How can we know? Also, please note frost on picnic table. Also note cleaning fluid spray bottles. It is Spring, the time of Toto cleanup.

Whilst at our campsite, we welcomed hot water into Toto’s digestive system for the first time in five months. This did not occur without some misadventure. It turns out that winterizing an RV is not enough to ensure tranquility and unbroken things; one must also un-winterize. More on that later.

A lovely little salmon stream empties into the canal just down from our campsite.

Yeah, the salmon flop their way up here every November and croak. People have Festivals to celebrate, or, more likely, to sell arts and crafts that otherwise go unsold.

Yeah, the salmon flop their way up here every November and croak. People have Festivals to celebrate, or, more likely, to sell arts and crafts that have gone unsold — quick, before the steady rains set in.

This creek area gets much shadier after the trees leaf out. It’s good to see it in all its lovely states.

If you’re dry-camping, you can get a campsite right along the creek, which runs for much of the summer, if summer is normal for around here, which is to say there is still some rain, on and off. Maybe we’ll try it some time — though we’ll have to be frugal with electrons, because our solar panels won’t be able to gather many soltrons or whatever they are.

Any time other than high tide, you can walk out onto a rocky-sandy point and take pictures of your RV. Yes, that is a thing people do. This is what they capture. All of that grass in the foreground is underwater at high tide. But, who cares.

Not him.

There may be some interest here. If it involves food.

We rented a movie and watched it one night in the TotoLounge. The Big Short, I think. It didn’t really fit with the wilderness theme of our stay.

But a lovely stay it was. We will surely be back to Belfair some time — it’s so close to home. But the months ahead will take us on two long-ish trips through different parts of Oregon, up to British Columbia, down to Mount Rainier National Park, back up to the Olympic Peninsula, and to a raft of Egg Gatherings. We will surely enjoy them all.

If I don’t break the water heater again.

Sharing is caring!

Following is daring.

When it rains, the tough go shopping (for bicycles and bike racks)

November 15, 2015 By drpaddle 2 Comments

The most glorious summer and fall the Northwest has seen for decades are distant memories. Around here, November means rain, and plenty of it. Typically the wettest month of the year, it is. Even the dogs, nearly always up for a stroll outside, are hunkered down on their chosen living room furniture items.

Every so often, I am standing on the soggy back lawn holding a golf umbrella over an unhappy Tyler, and he is giving me stink-eye while taking care of business. Wally is perpetually alarmed at the wet stuff interrupting his usual hourly patrols of the perimeter.

Work has been busy and poor Toto is lonely, huddled next to the house, visibly shivering despite the little electric heater keeping him semi-warm inside. We have reservations to go out camping for Thanksgiving, but if the rain doesn’t let up a little we might prefer to stay home. We’ll see. Wait — I just checked the forecast, and the day before we’re supposed to go, it’s going to be sunny. But cold. And temperatures are beginning to whisper that “winterize!” suggestion.

We’ll have some decisions to make.

But if the weather does relent, we’ll have extra fun out at nearby Belfair State Park, because we have acquired (early) holiday gifts. I gave one to Sooz; she gave one to me. Each has two wheels, a handlebar, some gears and an array of Comfort Features.

The marketing copy associated with the bikes we chose goes along these lines: “Sure, you haven’t ridden a bike in years, and the only Tour de France in your future is one you’ll watch on some cable channel. You’re going nowhere in a hurry, and we’ve designed the bike for you.”

But we do want to ride around some of those campground and park trails. And there are, allegedly, a number of good “rails-to-trails” trails (read “no-steep-grades” trails) in our part of the world. So we found some bikes that should be suitable. Happy Solstice to us, a month early.

Toto is equipped with a hitch receiver welded to his rear bumper, as part of an option called Bike Rack-Ready. I spent an appalling amount of time researching bike racks, including multiple reads of every bike rack thread on the Escape Forum. Here is what I learned:

Bike racks cost too much. Shocker.
Most hitch-mounted racks are designed to grab a bike by its frame and hold it there. The process of holding it there while you bounce around the countryside rubs paint off the bike. Wince.
Some racks hold the bike by its wheels only. These don’t scrape the paint. They also cost about what we paid for each bike, and they weigh 50 pounds. All of these numbers are too large; we need to conserve dollars for campsite fees, and weight for the sake of Tinman’s transmission.
Toto is not just bike rack-ready; he is flat-tire ready, which is to say there’s a spare tire mounted above his rear bumper. This means the proper name for Toto’s cycling-friendly option should be called “ready for some bike racks if their design accommodates a nearby spare tire the size of a small town.”
Though they don’t work too hard at disclosing it, most bike racks aren’t engineered to be used on RVs and trailers. One finds this out by checking the owner’s manuals, most of which say something like “do not use on RVs.” This is because RVs (especially trailers) bounce around more than cars and trucks. Bike racks have to be designed to securely hold on to their charges while experiencing a continuous minor rolling earthquake.

Ha! I found one that works for us: the Let’sGoAERO V2 bike rack. It only weighs 15 pounds or so, holds the bikes by their wheels, and I got it from Amazon for about 20% of what some people on the Escape forum — those with fewer limitations, no doubt — have paid for theirs.

Will we be sorry? Did I go too cheap? We’ll let you know.

Of course I found a way to make this more complicated than it had to be. The thing is, the V2 bike rack holds one bike forward of the rack — that is, between the rack and the trailer — and the other bike goes on the back. And, as we have discussed, the space between the bike rack and the back of the trailer is partially obstructed by the spare tire.

This means that, in order for the V2 to work, I have to extend the the hitch receiver on Toto’s rear bumper by a few inches. That’s tricky, because when one uses a hitch extension it reduces the load capacity of the hitch. Toto’s bike rack-ready hitch is rated at 150 pounds, and using an extension (like this one) reduces that rating to 100 pounds (and some would say, to be safe, to cut that extended capacity to 75 pounds).

Our bikes weigh 55 pounds. The rack weighs 15 pounds. So we have 5 pounds of wiggle room. Should work out okay.

We put the rack on TinMan’s hitch to pick up the bikes from the bike store. It worked fine! Easy to assemble, easy to mount the bikes, and the bikes survived the trip home without a hitch, as it were. And the bike store owner, a very helpful and friendly fellow named Kurt, was impressed with the rack, too. Or maybe he was just being nice.

We can’t wait to show you pictures of the bikes and the rack, resting securely at Toto’s stern. But we’re going to wait, because, as I may mentioned, we can’t go outside without inhaling a gallon of water and navigating small lakes spread around the property. We’ll watch for sun-breaks, as we call them around here, and grab our cameras, as soon as mother nature allows.

Sharing is caring!

Following is daring.

A different kind of kayak camping.

August 25, 2015 By drpaddle 4 Comments

I got to go paddling three times during our stay at Belfair State Park. Yippee! Sooz made this possible by agreeing to hang out with Wally and Tyler while I was on the water. This will surely cost me — and that’s only fair — and it was worth it.

This end of Hood Canal is fairly shallow, and the summer sun warms its waters to temperatures far more comfortable than you can find in most of the region, at any time of year. The water was also surprisingly clear for midsummer. Paddling alone, I stayed fairly close to the shore. I haven’t practiced self-rescue techniques for a while, so I thought I’d stay where I could swim (wade?) into shore if needed. Not needed though. What I mean is, I didn’t sink, and I didn’t dump. Good.

Doug heads out from the Hood Canal shoreline

When I lived in California, flat, saltwater kayaking like this was hard to find. Here in the Puget Sound region, it’s hard to get away from. Not complaining.

You can’t tell from the pic, but it was a little breezy and I was a little tentative on that first paddle — my first in more than a year. I didn’t venture too far, instead making “laps” back and forth in a half-mile area. It was fine. Getting back on the horse…

Kayak paddling along Hood Canal shoreline.

With the tide in, there were still some some tidelands showing, and these attracted birds, and I did what I do best with birds. I looked at ’em.

Here is what Tyler and Wally were doing while I enjoyed my little paddle. “Hey Tyler, what do you think we should do while Dad is gone and Mom is reading that book?” “Ah. Perhaps a nap, Wallace? I think yes. A nap!” “Okay. I’ll be right here beside you, prepared to grrrr if anything or anyone happens by, or possibly if a leaf falls. I wonder when it’s time for dinner. I really do.”

On our last full day at Belfair, I met a small contingent from the South Sound Area Kayakers — an Olympia-based club I’ve paddled with, sporadically, for many years — for a 12-mile paddle up to another state park and back. Great fun, and nice to catch up with one fellow I met years ago and who has done some amazing paddling trips lately. There was also the mandatory late arrival who held up the launch, forcing the group to carry their boats out farther and farther as the tide receded. We survived, and stopped for lunch at Twanoh State Park.

While we ate lunch and my fellow paddlers politely refused the store-bought cookies I had supplied, we enjoyed this view from our picnic table. Another lousy weather day in western Washington!

On this paddle we saw a few wild things… cormorants, a kingfisher, a few harbor seals, some Great Blue Herons, and the usual surfeit of gulls, traveling incognito. At the paddle’s end, I managed to find the deepest, muckiest mud for my landing spot, and a paste of salt and mud affixed itself firmly to Oscar Diggs’ hull. Cleaning it, a day later, was arduous, but also a good chance to catch up with neighbors who happened by.

Back at home, Oscar Diggs got a bath before returning to his hoist in the garage. I thought I got him clean and hauled him into the garage, only to see more mud — lots more — in a few spots I had missed. Back onto the lawn, and this time I got him clean.

So, yeah. Kayak camping used to involve careful stowage of just the right amount of food and camping gear into the boat, paddling off to some exotic locale, and then sleeping in a tiny tent on increasingly hard ground (that is, the ground got harder as I got older). Now, it’s sleeping in Toto’s deluxe master bedroom and toddling out to the water when… I feel like it. Not saying one approach is better than the other — neither is. But it’s nice to have the choice.

Sharing is caring!

Following is daring.

Camping at the bitter end of Hood Canal

August 24, 2015 By drpaddle 3 Comments

I don’t know where I was there, for a while, but now I do. I mean I knew where I was, but I also knew I wasn’t writing. But now I am. I’ll explain later.

We took off last week for a six-day, five-night adventure at Belfair State Park in western Washington. We’ve been here before, but that was in late Fall and a little nippy. Quiet, though. This time, just a few weeks before schools are back in session, the place was packed. And not at all nippy.

By reserving precisely 9 months in advance we secured a “waterfront” site. I wanted to be able to do some kayaking without the hassle of carting the boat between campsite and launch point. Our site worked well for that, with a caveat: timing the tide.

Toto and Oscar Diggs in a stare-off with Hood Canal.

Our campsite T30 at Belfair State Park, just an hour or so after high tide. The only thing between us and Hood Canal was a path used by approximately 1240 people per day. Also, at max ebb tide, about a half-mile of mud and exposed seagrass and a lot of oyster shells.

Tidelands along the shores of Belfair State Park

At low tide our waterfront campsite became landlocked. Well, mudlocked. Here we have an example of a bad time to launch or land a kayak. Too much carrying a 50-pound boat over slippery mud and grass and sharp oyster shells. Still… beats real life.

But, hey, this trip wasn’t all about kayaking. There was scenery to stare at, a promised meteor shower, the mandatory dog-walks, and probably some work for me to do (clients always call just before we head out on a trip — in fact, I’ve learned that scheduling a trip is a good way to stimulate client demand).

Toto, some picnic table stuff, and Hood Canal.

It was 90 degrees the afternoon of our arrival. We focused on setup and dog-walking, and while we did that the tide rose. The timing of our trip resulted in high tides at early morning and early evening.

Note: this is western Washington, right next to Hood Canal, a fjord extending from Admiralty Inlet all the way to Belfair, some 45 miles. It’s August, but regardless, it’s supposed to be kind-of green. But it wasn’t, and it’s not. We’re sharing a drought with the rest of the west coast, and brown is the new green.

Campsite T30 as seen from the waterfront trail at Belfair State Park.

You can see that we had plenty of space in our campsite. Space enough, even, for Sooz to pamper the pooches with bowls of fresh water, delivered directly to them in the lounge chairs that are supposed to be for us humans. But. Because the ‘waterfront’ campsites are themselves fronted by a waterfront trail, some campers felt the need to access the trail through our campsite. In fact some felt that our campsite to be some sort of day use area. Many of these same campers were, apparently, immune to stinkeye. Eventually Sooz created a tasteful fence out of the plastic step-stools we use to get Oscar Diggs up to his perch atop TinMan.

Should you plan a camping or RVing trip to Belfair State Park in Summer? Maybe. There are many many many many many children, of all ages, riding skateboards and bicycles and hideous loud plastic annoying pretend cars pulled by bicycles, careening through the campground on the road designed for cars and trucks and RVs and suitably courageous pedestrians, and also on the aforementioned Waterfront Path, or did I say Trail.

I would like to provide photographic evidence of the camping-loop carnage, but I think I would then have to get signed releases from those boarders/scooters/bikers and that’s a higher level of organization than I’ve achieved as yet. But here’s a sense of how things look if you’re not in a waterfront campsite:

Kind-of crowded. The farther from the water, the more oppressive it felt. Yet it was completely full, so people are happy to be here, I guess.

But look, if you have the kids, or the boards, or the scooters, or the plastic cars, and you’re looking for a place to deploy them away from your home neighborhood, this might work for you. It clearly works for others.

So, for the moment, let’s leave it at this. You can have a lot of wondrous moments camping at Belfair State Park in Summer. You have to time things right, and some patience is required. But that’s okay, no? Yes. One wondrous moment:

This little feller is a Killdeer, I think. He (or she?) and I met on the waterfront early one morning and actually communicated telepathically. Oh probably not.

There is much more to report about this trip, and then some other stuff. I’ll get right on it.

Sharing is caring!

Following is daring.