Route: Columbia Plateau Trail (WA)

Submitted by go_shep on Thu, 02/18/2021 - 07:36pm
Location
Washington, US
Distance
198 km
Vertical Gain
736 m
Description

The Columbia Plateau Trail is 20-foot-wide, 200km long corridor in eastern Washington state maintained as part of the Washington State Park system. The trail runs along the abandoned right-of-way of the former Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway from Cheney to the confluence of the Snake and Columbia rivers at Pasco, Washington, passing through five counties in the southeastern part of the state. The trail surface is primarily the large ballast rock remains of the former railway, but gravel improvements have been made to several miles at each end of the route.

This route includes 6 tressel bridge crossings (as of Feb 2021, all are inaccessible and require passing through the respective canyons) and several rock tunnels, one of which is over 500 meters long!

https://parks.state.wa.us/490/Columbia-Plateau-Trail

GPS Track
Images

Comments

Great job.  This trail caught my eye last summer as a real stretch goal, and some of the online descriptions made it seem possibly impassable (the missing bridges).  Nice effort, and cool that you established this route.

I will be going for a supported attempt on 5-11-2023.  Thanks, Mathew Shepard, for establishing this route!  I've never run in this part of the State so I'm looking forward to seeing the area.  Thanks Christof and Megan for all the pics and Relive video, super fun to see what's in store.  I'll be starting at the Ice Harbor Dam trailhead around 4-5am.  I'll be tracking with my Garmin fenix 6 and an inreach mini.  Here's a link to the mapshare page for those who'd like to follow along!  https://share.garmin.com/CDDGH