Plan C

Two friends and I headed to Mt. Rainier yesterday with a plan to hike to Camp Muir, the small, flat-ish area at an elevation of 10,000 feet on the massive 14, 411-foot mountain where most summit climbers put up tents and spend their first, often somewhat breathless night,  before climbing to the top the next day.

When we arrived at Paradise, however, the winds were howling and spindrift snow was blasting the landscape -- this at the relatively "low" elevation of 5,000 feet -- such that we didn't even want to get out of the car, much less climb five thousand feet of elevation higher into the teeth of the nastiness.

We considered a Plan B: To drive a bit lower and snowshoe out the Stevens Canyon Rd (still closed for the winter and snow-covered) toward the Tatoosh peaks;  but it turned out that the winds were whipping there too, and we were also concerned about avalanche potential.

In the end, we drove further down the mountain below Longmire,  hiked/snowshoed the Kautz Creek trail up toward (but not quite to) Indian Henry's Hunting Ground,  and wound up having a great outing. From our lunch spot on a high, snowy knoll, we could look out toward Mt. Adams (above) and some of the westerly Tatoosh peaks.

Once back at the car at the end of the day, we watched a lenticular cloud form over Rainier, an indication that the high winds on the mountain had not let up. Magic Hour photographic light was wonderful.

Post-hike dinner was at the Wildberry in Ashford, a sweet little restaurant run by a Nepali Sherpa family.  I got to say "Namaste" a lot, drink Nepali tea, and we three hikers enjoyed a fine meal. I had Nepali dalh (lentils) and was in vegetarian heaven.

Hike stats:

Approx 8+ mi RT
2300'+ ele gain

Click to Play!

 

So today I thought I'd give you a chance to have a little participatory,  video game-like fun with some of my recent pictures -- wide,  panoramic images that BEG to be viewed at a size larger than what you'll initially see here.

I'll keep this text short and sweet, to give you time to play. Click on the photographs to see them at a larger size.

You will be looking at the recent "Blood Moon" and the Seattle skyline viewed from Bainbridge Island...and a number of wide shots of my hiking buddy, Neil, on a trip we did a couple of weeks ago at Mt. Rainier...while the bottom two photographs are from hikes we did this summer in the North Cascades.

Ready?
Set…
CLICK!!!

 

This, that, and the other thing

It seems to me that photography these days sometimes tends to be a trendy, flavor-of-the-week kind of thing. Last week my image-making brothers and sisters were shooting pictures with their cameras tilted crooked, trying, I guess,  to produce imagery that was "different" than the norm. This week maybe they are shooting everything with a wide lens, kind of half out of focus. Next week…well, who knows?

Last week we were sharing our work online using Flickr, this week it is Instagram, and next week…?

I say: Hooey!  None of the above really matters, does it? At least not to me.

What matters is this: Is my heart in an image I've made? Do you, as a viewer, sense even an inkling of any kind of soul in what I've shot?

Here is a sampling of a bunch of personal pictures I've shot fairly recently (they're "personal,"  in that no one paid me to do them.)  They're images I made because I was exercising my eyes, or I saw something that pleased me, or maybe I was just goofing around, playing. 

Will they last for me? Will I think the pictures are worthy a year from now, and do the pictures have visual staying power? I can't answer that because I don't know. Only time will tell.

I do hope the pictures aren't the result of me simply following a stylistic trend.

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Above: Leah and I were invited to dinner at a friend's house, and it happened that they had a swimming pool ("it was here when we bought the house," my friend said, half-apologetically.) I liked the light near the diving board.

Below: Some friends stayed overnight at our house and I shot pictures of their child.

And I shot these pictures of the Tibetan prayer flags that hang in our yard...my way of remembering when the wisteria was in bloom, and sketching (with my camera) early-morning light.

And of course I'm forever shooting pictures of our Best Friend, Pax.

A friend and I did a hike last weekend on the north side of Mt. Rainier.

And, as I cut the grass near my strawberry garden, this little fellow hopped past the mower. I stopped the machine, carefully picked up Little Froggy, and moved him out of harm's way.

On Ruth Mountain

I guess there are many reasons I have climbed mountains over the years:

I climbed Mt. Rainier because she is the highest peak in Washington.
I climbed Mt. Stuart because, to me, she is the most beautiful.
I climbed Mt. St. Helens because she is arguably the most notorious.

And, last week, three friends and I climbed Ruth Mountain in the North Cascades, and it happens that two of us have mothers named Ruth.

After my climb of Ruth Mountain, I called my mother to tell her that I had made the trip to her namesake.  Mom seemed pleased about the mountaineering adventure I had done in her honor. But,  in true Mom style, she was, more than anything, happy that I'd come back healthy.

We climbers were tiny figures in the vast landscape of Ruth Mountain.  Click on the images to see them at a larger size.

Back Yard

Out in my garage, packed away in a box stored on some undetermined and probably cluttered shelf, are Sierra Club engagement calendars that I used in the late 1970's when I lived in my home state, Ohio. Though it has been something like 35 years since I made notations in those calendars so that I did not absent-mindedly forget a dentist appointment, or when I needed to get the oil changed in my car, or birthdays of family and friends, there are two things that, to this day, I remember very clearly about those calendars:

The photographs.
And the places where they were made.

There was an image of Comet Falls, the water dropping like a shot over a vertical rock face perhaps 300 feet high in Mt. Rainier National Park. And a photograph of the rock formations called sea stacks, looking like giant, geological shark fins, rising up near the beaches of the Pacific Ocean on the Washington Coast. I also remember pictures of the rainforest in Olympic National Park…and of the severe and scary-looking peaks of North Cascades…and of the basalt cliffs glowing red just before sunset near the Columbia River.

Those are places that are in my (extended) back yard now; and, thought I often miss family and friends in Ohio,  the Pacific Northwest has become our Home.

Several days ago a neighbor and I drove to the trailhead of the Buckhorn Wilderness, just 45 minutes from our homes, and we wandered with our cameras in the forests near the Olympic Mountains.

It was not a day where we hiked to get someplace. 

Rather, we were content to simply be.

A Gift

A friend and I headed to Central Washington Monday to hike a trail that the hiking guidebook said was nice-enough, but didn't really offer much, view-wise.

Oh, I beg to differ.

Perhaps only in the state of Washington -- where one can hike in over-the-top natural wonderlands like Mt. Rainier National Park or the North Cascades --  would the place you see in the photographs I'm posting today be poo-poo'd as being scenically sub-standard.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then the landscape that my friend and I beheld Monday was nothing to complain about, thank-you-very-much Mr. or Ms Snooty Guidebook Author. Neil and I covered 16 miles and did not encounter a single other human being all day long, perhaps thanks to the book's negative report. All we encountered was solitude, snowy silence, and more than a little beauty.

The hike was a fine Christmas Week gift!

Three Hikes

Back in early January one of my hiking buddies sent me an email recapping the facts and figures for the mountain adventures we had done in 2013.

“If baseball is nothing but a game of statistics,” he wrote,  “why can't hiking be, too?”

I understood that my friend was joking, because the reality is that we don’t do hikes so that later we can brag about how many miles we have traveled, or how high we have climbed on a peak. Our trips are more about breathing clean air, taking in the beauty of nature, recharging our spirits.

Still, the numbers were kind of fun to know. According to my friend’s journal, we did 42 hikes in 2013; traveled 391 miles, for an average of 9.3 miles per hike;  and gained 105,404 feet (19.96 miles) of elevation, for an average of 2,510 feet per hike.

“If nothing else,” my friend concluded, “doing this calculation demonstrates that I have way, way too much idle time on my hands.”

Today I thought I’d post sets of pictures I’ve shot on hikes my friends and I have done the past three weekends.

The image above is one that a friend shot of me, laying in the high country snow and using a compact camera to make snaps of the others who were on the trip (I also carry a larger camera to use for more "serious" pictures.)

That hike was on the Icicle Ridge Trail in the Central Cascades, a route that begins down low in warm, spring sunshine,  but climbs 4800-feet into snow.

A week later we decided to head to the dry, sagebrush country in the Yakima River Canyon. Meadowlarks sang to us as we made the several-hour trek up, up, up to the top of Umtanum Ridge.  Colorful, sunburned lichens decorated the rocks of the canyon.

And last weekend a friend and I headed to Mt. Rainier to make the long, snowy trek to Camp Muir at 10,200 feet, the spot where most climbers spend their first night when making the 2-day trip to the 14, 409-foot summit.  We were in snow every step of the way that day but there was not a cloud in the sky. Most of the day it was warm enough that we hiked in just our base layer clothing, not needing jackets.

At day’s end we lingered on Rainier to watch evening light paint nearby Pyramid Peak a red-gold color, and a nearly-full moon rose to complete the picture.

Relative Solitude

It’s funny,  the things we human beings do in the name of “weekend fun.”  Take this past Saturday and Sunday,  for example, two perfect, blue-sky, 70-some degree summer days in the Pacific Northwest:

--Ten thousand cyclists pedaled bikes here,  a colorful, sweaty stream of lycra-clad weekend warriors who rode in the 34th annual Seattle-to-Portland Bicycle Classic.  The macho types covered the 202-mile distance in one day, while your average Joe or Josephine did the ride in two.  Event sponsors report that seventy-five percent of the riders were male, 25 percent female, and that the oldest registered rider was 90. Thirty-five thousand sandwiches were consumed, 17,000 cookies, 17,200 servings of bananas, and 35,000 snack bars.  Thirty-one of the 202 miles were uphill.

I’ve done the Seattle-to-Portland several times (it was a number of years ago,)  and today, Monday, I wonder what the statistics would be for riders complaining of sore butts.

--Forty-some-thousand folks put on their favorite tie-dye t-shirts or sun dresses, packed their bodies into 1960’s-vintage Volkswagen micro-busses (with peace signs spray-painted on the sides) and made their way toward Eugene, Oregon for the 44th annual Oregon Country Fair.  From Friday through Sunday (a two-day weekend is not long enough for a gonzo spectacle like Country Fair)  Fair-goers grooved to live music, danced, and,  well, had some-far-out times.

I too have attended Country Fair the past several years. I’ve taken in the wild scene and made a lot of photographs (my blog post from last year’s Fair can be found here.)  

This year, however  (I can’t quite say why) I decided to take a bit of a break from big crowds...and so yesterday three friends and I headed to Mt. Rainier where we did a hike from Paradise Lodge (elevation 5,000 feet) up to Camp Muir (10,000 feet.) Though there were in fact other hikers and climbers also on the mountain, the distances on the slopes of Rainier are so vast that, much of the day, my friends and I felt pretty much alone. We trekked steadily up-up-up in the snow, gaining the 5,000 feet of elevation in four hours. We had a leisurely lunch at Camp Muir, then descended, sliding on our butts down long snow slopes (it’s called “glissading,”) arriving back at the wildflower-filled meadows of Paradise in no time.

A day of relative solitude felt just right.