July is here, it was past time to take a backpack trip, so we hit the Fremont National Recreational Trail on it’s northern end and headed toward Yamsay Mountain. We’ve been on other sections of the trail back when we were wandering the Warners, but this was our first jaunt up Yamsay. Our cool spring weather is long past, and the uphill through the lodgepole was hot and dusty. But on the plus side, we were in the mountains with nobody around.
Spring in Oregon was wet. That’s relevant here for a couple reasons. When planning out our early summer we put a couple river trips on the calendar. We had already cancelled a trip on the John Day due to high flows, and as we approached our dates for the Grande Ronde flows were similarly high. What could we do instead? We decided to still head to the northeast corner of the state, but we morphed our plans into a road trip.
There’s a few good reasons why we haven’t been to the San Juan Islands in Washington. The main one being the huge obstacle in the way of getting there, also known as Seattle. The other being that well, they are islands. Typically we’d truck camp to a destination like this but the extra step of ferrying to multiple islands made this an item that barely made the list of places to consider visiting. Then in 2021 we purchased our 16 foot Hewes Craft, also known as the Red Baron. All the sudden a visit seemed pretty intriguing and it got bumped up the list several slots. Our window for this exploratory trip was a week in June, we packed the boat and headed north. After a night in Washington Park in Anacortes we launched off into the salt for a week of adventure.
James Island Camp
Our first stop was James Island. The original plan was a much more distant island, but with a small craft warning in effect we made the short hop over to James. There was one boat there upon arrival but they soon left and we had the place nearly to ourselves. After reading about James we worried about racoons raiding camp, but it seems that issue may be in the past.
