The Best in Tent Camping: Washington : A Guide for Car Campers Who Hate RVs, Concrete Slabs, and Loud Portable Stereos (The Best in Tent Camping)
- Book Review,
by Jeanne Louise Pyle
Review
"This is a great resource for families looking for scenic, secluded locations where they can easily take the kids, or for those folks who don''t have the time or the inclination for a full-scale backpacking trip."--Backpacker Magazine
Review
"This is a great resource for families looking for scenic, secluded locations where they can easily take the kids, or for those folks who don't have the time or the inclination for a full-scale backpacking trip."
--Backpacker Magazine
Book Description
Whether it''s rafting down the Nooksack River, hiking along the Pacific Northwest Trail, or fishing in the Puget Sound, Washington is chock full of opportunities for outdoor enthusiasts of all abilities. To help these adventurers on their way, The Best in Tent Camping: Washington reveals the best places in the Evergreen State to pitch a tent. Written to steer campers away from concrete slabs and convoys of RVs, The Best in Tent Camping: Washington points tent campers to such scenic sites as Corral Pass, Merrill Lake, and Haag Cove.
Back Cover Copy
If you subscribe to the opinion that televisions, Japanese lanterns, and electric guitars are not essential camping equipment, The Best in Tent Camping: Washington should be your constant companion.
From rocky coastlines to sagebrush deserts, camping in Washington has never been better. The Best in Tent Camping: Washington is a guidebook for tent campers who like quiet, scenic, and serene campsites. It's the perfect resource if you blanch at the thought of pitching a tent on a concrete slab, trying to sleep through the blare of another camper's boombox, or waking up to find your tent surrounded by a convoy of RVs.
The Best in Tent Camping: Washington will guide you to the quietest, most beautiful, most secure, and best managed campgrounds in the state. Painstakingly selected from hundreds of campgrounds in the Evergreen State, each campsite is rated for: beauty, noise, privacy, security, spaciousness, and cleanliness.
Each campground profile provides essential details on facilities, reservations, fees, and restrictions, as well as an accurate, easy-to-read map making the campground a snap to locate.
About the Author
Jeanne Louise Pyle is a transplanted Marylander who has lived in the Pacific Northwest for nearly thirty years. She has worked exclusively in the book and magazine publishing industries, wearing many hats--from publisher to sales rep to author. Her love of the outdoors led to writing the first edition of The Best in Tent Camping series ten years ago. She currently resides in Bellingham, Washington, conveniently equidistant between her two favorite cities--Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Northwest''s longest and largest river cutting a huge sea-level pass through the Cascade Mountains teams with the world''s second largest monolith to produce the main attractions for campers at Beacon Rock State Park. Beacon Rock, once known as Castle Rock, towers 848 feet above the mighty Columbia River in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area and is second only to the Rock of Gibraltar in size. Several other similar but smaller rock formations in this section of the gorge have prompted geologists to hypothesize that Beacon Rock may be the exposed volcanic plug of an ancient mountain, part of a range that preceded the Cascades. The monolith could be as much as nine million years old.
Apparently unimpressed by this massive icon of geologic time, the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to blast Beacon Rock into bits sometime around the turn of the century. Fortunately railroad officials opposed the idea enough to get the demolition stopped. Theirs wasn''t a particularly noble reason, however. They just didn''t want rocks falling on their new tracks. Another popular idea at the time was to convert the rock to a quarry.
The fate of Beacon Rock remained uncertain until 1915 when Henry Biddle bought it and proceeded to build a trail to its summit. The project cost him $15,000, a considerable sum in those days. When Biddle died, his heirs were instructed to sell Beacon Rock to the State of Washington for a mere dollar. One small restriction accompanied the astonishingly low price, however. The land was to be preserved as a public park.
At first the state refused to honor the terms, so the Biddle family approached the State of Oregon with the same deal. An Oregon-owned park on Washington State soil almost became a reality until Washington reconsidered and handed over the buck.
Today the three-quarter mile trail to the top switches back a dizzying 52 times and crosses 22 wooden bridges. Panoramic views up and down the gorge including Oregon''s Mount Hood and Washington''s Mount Adams are the reward.
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