Photos from this trip can be found here.
Our second visit here and more or less followed the same route from a year and a half ago. As always, views were better higher up than in the canyon, so we stayed on the ridge to the immediate east. Sadly this time there were no lupines like the massive amount of them we saw in springtime.
It took several visits to finally realize that some of the places we’ve visited in this area were all on the Umtanum Ridge. Just west of here Black Canyon looked to be a popular one, and to the east end there’s Umtanum Creek Canyon that drains into Yakima River.
Pups and I got up to the high point and stopped at 3,800′ past the dirt road. From there, on the north side we could see Ellensburg nestled in Kittitas Valley behind Manashtash Ridge, and Yakima Valley to the south.
We bummed around until one hour before sunset, then scrambled back down the ridge and got back to the car just after dark.