March 26th - Kendall Skyline Road

For starters: 

I include this little snip, taken from Google Maps, zoomed in on some seemingly obscure back road nearly at the southern border of the state. Clearly marked! Kendall Skyline Road. 

And it turns into . . . NF 64? NF 6436? Lord even knows. And then one can find roads marked Kendall Skyline Road on stretches of road up near Dayton. I've honestly been trying to just sort out. . . is it a road, or is it a trail? Is it continuous? Does it have different names along some sections? Who is Kendall? 

I have found more questions than answers, so let me again give you a map showing you where I went. 

The Big Picture. Things start as "Eckler Mountain Road", and seemed to be signed as such for much of the first stretch.

A little more zoomed in for the latter half. You can see Pioneer Park here as 
a good landmark!

My hike over some snowy roads to the end of my walk. 
It just got steeper and snowier, and I had found some good birds!

So, maybe seasonally the road continues and would get you to that clip at the start of the post here, but you have no guarantees from me on that speculation. 

Eckler Mountain Road? 

I'll call it that for now. I took it up towards Pioneer Park and loved the beautiful scenery as I rose up above more and more farmland. 

The road wasn't always great, but it was drivable! As I approached Pioneer Park, I realized that I had bluebirds on wires bordering the fields. Both Mountain, and Western Bluebirds (species 92 for the year for Columbia County - a number I'll keep track of parenthetically here). 

Western Bluebirds - female and male

Pioneer Park itself was a nice little stop. Flickers, Red-breasted Nuthatches, Cassin's Finches, and Red Crossbills. It was a nice little patch of Ponderosa in the middle of all of the agriculture. Across the street from the park, some nice open fields hosted Red-tailed Hawk, Northern Harrier, and a single Rough-legged Hawk (93). This is not an uncommon bird in the county, but one I'd been struggling to find! Even here, the views were brief. 

A Red-tailed, at least, posed for me!

Up, and up, and I passed a parking lot on the left (you can see it in the images above, near the end of the line for me). I finally got to a point where a sign informed me that my car really shouldn't continue. As I have done so many times before, I used this as a cue to get out and walk. It was hard to believe how different things were, compared to the previous day when I'd been hiking near the Snake River in 70+ degree weather, now I was tromping through snow under a forest canopy. I had Chickadees aplenty, including my first Chestnut-backed Chickadee (94). 

As I tend to do in these situations, I did a little Northern Pygmy Owl whistle periodically. I got no responses. As I was starting to get a feeling of FOMO (fear of missing owls), I stopped at the sound of an American Goshawk (95). The Blue Mountains are one of the best places to find these birds, but it's still an unexpected treat. The bird gave several rounds of the piercing, wild, ki-ki-ki call, letting me get a recording on my lil' flip phone to make comparisons later. 

Yes, there's a Chestnut-backed Chickadee behind those crisp-lookin' branches
What kind of idiot even includes bird pictures like this??
This kind right here. 

But no Varied Thrush yet! This disappointed me, honestly. I was thinking about this, and of how walks up snowy roads like this had led me to Varied Thrushes in other counties in other years. Resolute, I started back up the road, when I got a quite unexpected culinary question: "Who cooks for you?" Barred Owl??!! (96) It called clear as a bell and twice from . .  . gosh maybe 100-200 feet away, and then never again. I tried to get the thing to call back with a variety of calls, but had to just let it go. 

Barred Owls, unheard of a century ago in the state, have moved in and made Washington home. But. . . not all of Washington, really! Western Washington has plenty of Barred Owls, but they are largely absent from the lowlands of the Columbia Basin and are still scarce in the Blues. Fewer than five records had been recorded specifically for Columbia County. So, this counted as a second good stroke of luck in a very short time. 

So...okay, it's a long read, but I *think* they're saying that if you go there when
you're not supposed to go there, then they *may ban* you from going
there for the rest of the time that you're not supposed to go there. 
Chew on that.

But my favorite bird of all, Varied Thrush, had deserted me. I shook my head, wondering how it could. "I'm probably going to get to 100 birds in the county before I get a Varied Thrush. You'd almost think that they don't know how much I love them." I tried throwing this out into the cold air around me as I tromped back down towards my car. 

Ha! It worked. Varied Thrush, bird 97 for my Columbia County year list, and the last new one for the trip. 

I made my way back down and stopped for a meal at Moose Creek Cafe and Bakery in Dayton. Not a place I'd stopped before, but I'm glad I did. Nice view of the county courthouse, and it was interesting to listen to the locals at a nearby table talking about various topics of civic interest, including the 2023 closing of the jail in Dayton (people are brought to Walla Walla when that is necessary). I paid up, hitting the road, and stopping only briefly to gaze at the Snow Geese in Burbank one more time, in hopes of turning up a Ross's Goose. Nope!

More to come, but not until May! Vehicular-driven expenditures had me tightening my belt. Vehicular-driven lack of driving made it easy for me to include "not going to the opposite corner of the state" in my list of belt-tightening measures. At least for April!

Columbia County Courthouse