For Labor Day Weekend this year, my family and I went camping in Heyburn State Park. The park is 50 miles SE of Spokane, WA; about an hour and a half drive. It is the oldest state park in the Pacific Northwest, created in 1908. We stayed at a campground called Hawley’s Landing. The campground itself was okay, the spaces were a bit too close together for my liking, but the location was great. There were plenty of hiking trails nearby, as well as a marshland with a cool boardwalk.
My best friend came on the trip with my family and we spent all day Sunday hiking through the park. We started with the Lakeshore Loop Trail which starts at the Hawley’s Landing Campground and wraps around the outside of the marshland, eventually connecting with Plummer Creek trail. This short trail connects the Lakeshore Loop with the Indian Cliffs trailhead. We followed the Indian Cliffs trail for awhile until it connected with the paved Trail of the Coeur d’Alene’s. This trail is 72 miles long, but we only walked about 5 miles of it round trip.
The park was beautiful, though it had obviously been a very dry summer. You could see that fires had burned large portions of the forest and the low growth looked to be very young. It was raining the entire weekend, which was good for the forest, but not so good for hiking. I wish I would have been able to see more of the Trail of the Coeur d’Alene’s because there is a 3.100 ft high bridge across the St. Joe river that would have provided an excellent photo opp.
