Echo Basin is a basalt coulee which lies immediately south of Frenchman Coulee in the Columbia River Gorge in central Washington. The area is incredibly popular with climbers but is also home to a large sand dune which is a great place for desert gear testing:
Goals
Explore Echo Basin- Explore Frenchman Coulee (ran out of time)
- Explore south to I-90 (ran out of time)
- Trace the climber’s trail up from the bottom of Echo Basin to the northern wall (ran out of time)
Test trekking pole ends in the sand to see which ones would prevent the pole from sinkingTest snow stakes in the sand to see if they hold firmTest out the Oboz thermal insoles in the Oboz AretesSee how Raidlight desert gaiters perform at keeping sand out- Take a photograph from the base of the cliffs facing upwards (forgot)
- Test out the Sawyer S1 / CNOC Vecto gravity filter combo (ran out of time)
- Try using the trekking pole as a monopod (annoying)
Test out the 2-second self-time on the camera for steadier hand-held shots
Gear
No LighterPack since this was a short day trip.
What Worked
REI’s snow stakes were great in the sand! Slid right in, tons of holding power.
The mud baskets on my Element Equipment trekking poles are more than enough to keep the poles from sinking into the sand when used tip-down with the Lunar Solo. Also, interesting note: the Lunar Solo includes a grommet which you’re supposed to place the trekking pole’s carbide tip into. Of course, that won’t work if you’ve got a basket attached to the tip since the basket would be flush with the sand and the tip would be buried. As an alternative they also include a little elastic loop which you can place around the shaft of the pole before screwing on the basket. Nice little detail.
The Columbia Zero Rules PFG shirt continues to impress. I was completely comfortable while setting up the tent on the sand in sunny 60F weather (the Kestrel Drop even recorded a single 71F data point although I’m assuming this is just because it was sitting directly in the sun) and would immediately and significantly cool down as soon as I stepped into the shade. It’s hard to say how much of this is due to the Omni-Freeze Zero cooling rings versus ye olde sweat evaporation but the shirt definitely has a very wide comfort temperature range.
So glad to be back out in my Prana Stretch Zion pants, didn’t even think about them once (which is often the highest praise you can give a piece of clothing). The Kuhl Kontra Air are dead to me.
I’ve been working on an improvement to an anchoring system that I put together for alpine environments where stakes don’t work and the only things to tie off to are rocks:
I’ve shortened the overall cord length since in practice rocks you can actually move tend not to be that big. I also added a carabiner for quick on-off attachment. Previously I was girth-hitching the tensioner to the tent’s built-in attachment points which made it a pain to re-use when I got a second tent.
In any case, you can see it here cinched up around the snow stake and working just fine in the sand. I’m hoping to have a dedicated article up later this week.
What Didn’t
My Osprey Levity 60 backpack review starts out with an embarrassingly long rant about how the pack is short and doesn’t bump up against the brim of my hat. Well, it turns out this only applies while standing up: while lying prone and trying to take a photo at ground level the frame of the pack kept bumping into the back of my head. One of the things I pride myself on is how infrequently I need to take my pack off but apparently this is just one of those times.
The Oboz insulated insoles seem helpful in sub-freezing conditions but in merely cool weather I feel like they just make your feet sweat. Or maybe the fuzzy tops just hold more moisture than the plain tops of their regular insoles? In any case the bottoms of my feet felt a bit clammy so I’m going to stick with the stock insoles (which are excellent).
I briefly considered getting out my trekking pole to carry around and use as a tripod but decided against it. I hate having things in my hands while I’m hiking and didn’t relish the idea of having to keep it folded up in my armpit for an extended duration. I’ll give it a whirl on some other trip where I have more time to play around.
What’s Next
Since the gaiters, snow stakes, mud baskets, and attachment system all worked great in the sand there really isn’t anything that needs to be replaced or upgraded. Spooky!
Route
Gaia folder:
https://www.gaiagps.com/public/EH8DhqCqg80pd9pfJqxcOdfk
- Distance: 3.4 miles
- Elevation gain: 350 feet
This was a short trip because I slept in late and Person B wanted the car back to do some shopping before the stores closed at 5. Also the focus was mostly on testing gear in the sand at known locations and not crushing miles or exploring new areas.
Starting from the lower parking lot I headed straight south to the dune to do some gear testing while the weather was still good. Once that was done I took a circuitous route around the base of the basin’s cliffs just for exploration’s sake before heading back to the car.
Flowers & Critters
I saw my first porcupine! It was hanging out in the rocks at the east end of the basin. Sadly there’s no pictures because with the wide angle lens at that distance he’s just a few spiny yellow pixels. Still, very cool.
Oh, and a marmot ran across the road as I was driving away from the parking lot.
As far as flowers the only thing I saw were some young yellow bells to the west of the basin’s watering hole.
Photography
SmugMug gallery:
https://turigrinos.smugmug.com/Adventures/2020/Echo-Basin
I’ve been reading Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography boxed set and am trying out some new techniques. Mostly it’s an emphasis on sharpness via higher ISOs and shutter speeds vs. always trying to hit f4 which is my lens’s sharpest aperture. Since I do everything hand-held I’m also trying out one of the suggestions in the book which is to use the self-timer delay to reduce camera shake from pressing the shutter button. Oh, and I’m working on foreground composition as well. Let’s see how I did:
Very happy with this one. The converging lines give it a “sinking” feeling but the boulder has a nice upward contrast. It also breaks up the diagonal line starting from halfway up the left side and ending on the lower right. Shadows on the far wall look natural and there’s a nice splotch of sunlight there.
One of the funnier tips in the book is to just crop your landscapes to give them a panorama-like aspect ratio rather than actually futzing with the panning and stitching. The pile of rocks here is not the best foreground (although it’s better than nothing) and the orange-ish dirt in the lower right is pointlessly distracting. Still, I think it gives a good idea of the vastness of this place.
Sometimes nature just doesn’t cooperate. The sun was directly hitting the dune through a gap in the clouds while the wall behind it was shaded so I was hoping the light would focus attention accordingly. I wanted to capture something in the foreground, though, and all I could find was this vaguely yellow-ish bush in a snarl of dead sagebrush. Unfortunately standing between it and the dune was one particularly monstrous sagebrush who sort of stole the show (and blocked the view). The trail on the right is also barely recognizable, it looks more like a patch of dirt.
One of the techniques in Scott’s first book is to “walk around” and try to see the scene from multiple angles instead of doing the amateurish thing which is just to walk up and take the shot. I went down the trail, out into the brush and back to this spot before giving up and just rolling the dice. It’s a nice-ish picture but it doesn’t really focus on the sand dune nearly as much as I’d like.
I found a patch of black-ish sand with nice dark lines and tried a bunch of compositions but they all fell flat. In the end this close up crop of the single bunch of grass with the circular lines (formed by the ends of the grass waving around in the wind) juxtaposed against the horizontal black lines was the winner.
Oh hey, a balancing rock! Because of its position I had a hard time silhouetting it against the sky so I had to make due by using a shallow depth of field to give it some separation from the background. In hindsight I probably should have stepped to the right and stooped down to keep the top right edge away from the cliffs. It’s also not super evident that it’s even balancing.
Nature working against me again: instead of some cool flower or interesting thing behind this question mark-shaped snag I get… a plain ol’ bush. I played around with a horizontal shot before realizing that all the surrounding stuff just took emphasis away from the branch so I changed over to a portrait crop. The focus was also an issue, did I want to go all-in on the branch and leave the background a smear or did I want to get the bush in focus as well? In the end I went with the bush partially in focus to give some separation while still being able to tell what was going on. Worked out ok, I guess.