Echo River Ranch

   Five Plus Three
   Equals Eighty

   
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Friday - August 8, 1986 page 2

they were good. As many berry bushes as had been passed in the last few days, there were none to be seen any where nearby to put into the pancakes. About the time breakfast was over, the horses had quit eating and were ready to go again. It was just before 10:00 with only 9 miles to Snowgrass Flats.

The terrain soon changed and as they rode over a ridge and into the Yakima Indian Reservation, a great basin and a heat wave met them. Eastern Cispus Basin was a huge bowl with rock shale and trail along the upper ridge that swooped down to trees more than halfway down, and turned into a small stream valley in the distance. It provided a breath taking view, but they felt as though they were crossing a desert. The heat bounced off of the rocks and the ash sand to bake the air, while dust kicked up by the horses feet drifted up to choke the riders.

There were a couple of hikers coming across the trail and they were nice enough to climb up the shale rocks so that the riders could pass. While passing the hikers, the riders could view the trail before them and across the basin, they could see the switch backs of a trail winding steeply up to the top of the ridge. As they rode closer and closer to the switchback trail, no one said anything about their fears as to the steepness of the trail, but they all dreaded the thought of having to ride up it.

Coming around a small outreach, the riders were relieved to discover that the switchbacks were actually another trail. It was the actual Cispus Pass trail, which came up from the bottom of the eastern basin and crossed over the pass at the same point as the PCNST and split off again and continued on down into the bottom of the western basin.


                                   Just passing over the ridge into
                                eastern Washington and leaving the
                                   last meadow before the desert.

   
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