Lewis and Clark State Park, Washington - June 30th to July 4th, 2024

Lewis and Clark State Park in Washington was another nice state park. It was small, but a great place to hang out. The small town of Winlock was within cycling distance and Mount Saint Helens National Volcanic Monument was just over an hour’s drive away.

Sunday was a short driving day, from Milo McIver State Park in Oregon to Lewis and Clark State Park in Washington. After dumping and filling our tanks and before we left Milo McIver, we drove over to the fish hatchery to check it out. We covered the fish hatchery in our previous post on Milo McIver (Milo McIver State Park, Oregon - June 27th to 30th, 2024)

After we left the state park, the only stop we made was in Longview, Washington. In one general location we were able to eat lunch, do our laundry, go grocery shopping, and fill up our gas tank. While our clothes were washing, we ate lunch next door at Jimmy Johns. While our clothes were drying, Ann went grocery shopping at the nearby WinCo. Luckily she had her checkbook with her, because WinCo doesn’t take credit cards, only debit cards. Then we swung by a gas station across the street on our way out. It is so nice to efficiently take care of chores all at once.

Lewis and Clark State Park is a small park, a square piece of land measuring about one mile on each side of the square, but it is a lovely park. The camp sites are nicely spaced in the dense woods. There are eight miles of trails for equestrian and hiking use. After dinner, Ann explored some of the trails to get her exercise in for the day. Parts of the trails were a little overgrown along with some short sections of mud, but the trails were fun to explore as they wound through the old growth forest.

Monday was a chill day. We hung out at camp most of the day. In the afternoon, we explored a couple of the trails, the Trail of the Deer and the Old Growth Loop. There was nothing special to see along the trails, just a nice walk through the woods.

There were a half dozen or more bike packers that camped in Lewis and Clark State Park that evening. The park is along the Pacific Coast long distance bike route. We also noticed that there were hiker/biker camp sites at our previous campground, Milo McIver State Park in Oregon. We’re not sure what long distance hiking or biking trails, if any, go through that area.

We spent Tuesday at Mount Saint Helens National Volcanic Monument. We’ll cover that in our next blog post.

Wednesday we went for a bike ride. The town of Winlock was just 8 miles away and Keith discovered it had a bakery with good ratings, the Mill Bakery. And the bakery was just blocks from the World’s Largest Egg. That sounded like a good destination, so off we went.

We took two-lane backroads to get there, Park Road to Minkler to Nevil, which brought us into the center of the little town. The main part of town was only a few blocks long, but it was cute. We found a bike rack, right next to the Winlock Historical Museum. The museum was open, so we walked in to check it out. There was no admission, just a donation box.

We’re normally not museum people, but this one was small. We saw many items that we, our parents, or our grandparents used or owned. Perhaps that is what made it interesting. We struck up a lovely conversation with the two volunteers of the museum.

Winlock started out as a lumber town and was known as a major chicken hatchery, supplying a large area with chicks. For a period of time, Winlock was the second largest egg producing town in the country. Even though the hatchery business has dwindled down, they still hold the Egg Days festival the third Saturday in June, every year. The festival started in 1921, which is also when the first large egg was made. The current version of the World’s Largest Egg sits on the corner of Fir Street and Old Highway 603, near the old mill.

After strolling the main street in town and seeing the large egg, we went by the bakery to confirm that it was closed. Normally, it is only closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, but a sign on the door indicated they were closed the whole week for the 4th of July. The museum volunteers warned us that they heard the bakery was closed. However, they did tell us that a new coffee shop opened up just outside of town, on Old Highway 603, called the Union Brewed Coffee Company.

We both ordered the pomegranate and raspberry iced green tea, as was recommended by the barista. It was a tasty, refreshing drink that wasn’t too sweet. To go along with our drinks, they had cookies. We both ate one of each kind, a sugar cookie and a chocolate chip cookie. It probably wasn’t as good as what we might have had at the bakery, but the coffee shop was open and the cookies were free of charge, so we were happy. The treats fueled our hour-long bike ride back to the campground.

Thursday was another chill day at Lewis and Clark State Park. Ann worked on a video while Keith worked on our rig. Keith fixed a piece of trim that had come loose with super glue. We’ll see if that holds.

Ann thought we were done with Starlink install stuff, but Keith made a few more changes. First, he attached the 50 foot cable to the ladder on the back of Red Tail, replacing the 10 foot cable he originally attached there. We were struggling with where to store the 50 foot cable, so he decided we could just always have the longer cable attached and just not uncoil it when we need a shorter cable.

The other change was that he rewired the switch in the bedroom for the Starlink router. When he originally installed the switched outlet between the bedroom cabinets, it also controlled the outlet inside the driver side cabinet. So he rewired it in order for the outlet inside the cabinet to always be active. This was not a big deal since we never use that outlet anyway. But he was afraid we would forget that the outlet was switched and may wrongly believe it isn’t working some time in the future.

To get our exercise in for the day, we explored more of the trails inside the park. This time we crossed the highway to the other half of the park. The Jackson Highway runs right through the center of the park. The handful of full hookup sites are on the other side, right next to the highway. However, the highway is not very busy, so that shouldn’t really be an issue for those campers. But we like the setting of the non-hookup sites better.

Also on the other side of the park are a couple of buildings that can be rented out. One is the Lewis & Clark Lodge and the other is the Community Hall. There are a handful of equestrian camp sites, right near the equestrian trails.

We walked the equestrian trail over to the Black Bear Loop Trail. It was a nice walk through the woods. These trails were wider than the Trail of the Deer we did earlier in the week as they allow horses and bikes. We were lazy and didn’t put on our hiking boots. We usually wear our hiking boots when there is a possibility of mud. There were quite a few muddy patches along the trails, chewed up by hoof prints. However, there usually was a narrow strip of drier ground alongside the muddy areas, so we didn’t really get our trail runners dirty.

By the time we returned to our camp site, we covered 3.5 miles with an elevation gain of 272 feet in about an hour and a half. Since it was not that long or difficult of a walk, we didn’t count it towards our 52 Hike Challenge.

There weren’t any public firework displays in the area that we could find, so we just hung out at camp as our 4th of July celebration. We could hear plenty of fireworks going off in the evening, since the park is surrounded by private land. The fireworks continued until almost midnight, but the sound was rather muffled, since they were a distance away, so we had no troubles getting to sleep.

Despite being a holiday, Lewis and Clark State Park was not that crowded. We’ve seen plenty of fireworks in our lifetime, so just relaxing in the woods was a perfectly fine way to spend the 4th of July.

Check out our related video: Lewis and Clark State Park, Washington

(Ann)