Cape Disappointment State Park, Windstorm

shovelguy

Well-known member
For our second trip out with the new rig, we spent Veteran's day weekend at Cape Disappointment State Park. It's at the mouth of the Columbia river, on the Washington side and is pretty much exposed to winter storms coming out of the southwest. The cape got it's name from early sailors trying to get into the river, they could find the cape, but storms, sandbars, tides and what not kept them out of the river, hence the name.
Not withstanding the name, it's a pretty nice park with large full hook up sites and about as much privacy as you'll ever get in a state park.
We had two good days there and then on Sunday night the storm blew in, Steady winds of 35 mph, with gusts to 65 and around 5:00 am or so, a gust of 85 mph. That's when the park lost power and I assume most of the trees and power lines blocking the road in and out went down.
Our 3055RL has slide top awnings, they were rattling around most of the night, so I got up at 3:00 AM and pulled the slides in. That quieted it down some, but did not stop the rock and rolling the 5'ver was doing from the wind gusts. Power did not come back on until 10:00 am or so.There were quite a few trees down in the park, mostly along the road coming in. The trees in our loop were primaliy shore pine, and they don't get much over 20ft tall so we were ok in that regard.
We tried to wait out the storm, but finally gave up and hooked up, in a wind driven horizontal rain, and left the park around 11:30 am. We had to wait in one place, on the road out, for the state highway department to cut a large tree off the road, so we could squeeze past.
We suffered no damage of any kind, and made it home safely, so it was a good trip, the kind of trip you remember!!

Dean
 
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