August 10-14, 2025
This will be my third camping trip to Friends Landing since I started camping eight years ago. I love this place. It’s quiet, it’s pretty, it has lots of nice water around it (a nice river and a nice lake), it has birds, it has a gorgeous perfect view of sunsets, it’s easy to get to, close to home but feels far away, it has nice folks who work there, it has an “accessible” walkway around the entire Lake Quigg. It’s near the small town of Montesano, and even tho the town is small it has stores with anything I could ever need. As well there are lots of interesting things to see and do here that are an easy drive away, almost always through woods and water lands. I really like it here. 🙂
So here below is a Google Earth image of the general area around the campground. The BIG YELLOW DOT is the Friends Landing campground. The small yellow arrow on the right is the roadway that leads to the campground. That road is the only road in the image below. It’s really quiet here at night! For this camping trip, I brought my inflatable kayak so I could paddle around on Lake Quigg, then out the west waterway from the lake and out to the Chehalis River … and MAYBE even paddle downstream on the river, then up into Peels Slough. It’s so close to the Pacific Ocean here that I would have to do that somewhere around high tide, even tho the river is fresh water. Still, the tide affects the amount of fresh water in these waterways. I didn’t want to be stuck up Peels Slough and need to clamber back through the woods with my kayak on my back!
Below is a Google Earth close-up of the Friends Landing campground. In the past, I’ve always snagged the campsite with the YELLOW ARROW, with a perfect view from my trailer’s rear window of the lake and the sunset. But it wasn’t available when I wanted to go there this time, even weeks in either direction. So I settled on the campsite with the RED ARROW. I really liked it! I had no neighbors (there is almost always a neighbor right next to me when I’m in that YELLOW spot). And, little did I know, there was actually a small view of the lake and the sunset from that RED campsite (see the tiny red line from my campsite).
Friends Landing is such a beautiful place. There are a few small farms around, where people have removed trees and created small hay fields, or pastures for cows or horses. But mostly it’s just trees and birds and blue sky.
In the photo below, I backed Towhee the Trailer into that spot (which is a story in and of itself, backing around a more than 90-degree corner with people watching me, maybe I’ll tell you about it later). But after I got parked in that spot, in the photo below, you can see a grey truck on the right (and a black truck next to it in the next campsite). That grey truck is in MY favorite campsite. But I couldn’t complain … everything was so beautiful. AND, the grey truck was a RAM, just like mine.
The photo below was taken the next day, when those two trucks and their trailers had left. The spots were empty for two days. I thought about paying for one of those spots and moving, but it just wasn’t worth the effort and the extra money for just two days, when I would have then had to move back later in the week to the campsite that I was already in and had paid for.
There was no one to the left of me … not even any campsites … just a large grassy area.
The closest camper behind me was a small trailer (with its small white pickup truck to the left, below), but it was more than 100 feet away, and two very quiet adults were in it. And amazingly, no one ever came and stayed in that campsite next to me. It was empty all week.
I was here in August, height of the camping season, but the campground was mostly empty all week. Things did start to fill up a bit closer to the following weekend, but the area around me stayed quiet all week.
I enjoyed bright sunshine all week. On the other hand, we hadn’t had any rain at all for most of June or July. We usually get LOTS of rain in June, and some in July, but not this year. So it was DRY here, really parched, the ground and the plants. Usually no watering is needed hereabouts, but the campground staff were setting out sprinklers every morning to try to keep plants alive. I talked with one of the guys who was doing that, he said they just didn’t have enough staff and time to keep moving the sprinklers. I offered to help by setting the ones near me in the early morning (before they arrived), then again in the evening. He loved that! So I did that. A week after I got home and checked my credit card charges, there was a credit to me of $50 from this place. That was so good of them. But I gathered up $50 in cash and put it in an envelope and mailed it to them with a nice note. As I said above, these are really nice folks out here.
I had arrived in the mid-afternoon this first day, set up the trailer, walked around, chatted with a few folks, then settled in for the evening. It was warm enough that I ate my dinner while sitting out on the table behind my trailer. A few birds seemed interested in what I was eating, but they need to stay on their bird-diet, yes? 🙂
And then this sunset. Maybe you can see on the right side of the photo below that I had a small view of the lake from my campsite. There are campsites in between this campsite and the lake to the right, but no one was ever in any of those campsites all week. Boy, did I luck out. Partly because I had a little view of the water all day and evening … partly because I could walk over there with chair and camera in hand and just sit right there next to the water any time I wanted, all week.
What a beautiful world.