Talking to Trees

 

 An admission: I often talk to myself.  Not silent and mindless monkey-mind chatter.  I mean I talk out loud.

I'll be out alone, walking the half-mile trail that winds through the woods on one side of our property. I'll come around a bend in the trail and, through an opening in the trees,  I'll see an eagle flying overhead,  or, at my feet I'll notice a wildflower in bloom,  and I'll say "WOW!" 
If I'm feeling particularly verbal I might say "OH MY!"

Other times, when I'm out in the mountains on a hike with my friends and I see something amazing and comment about it, my friends probably think I'm sharing a thought with them. This is not necessarily so. I'd likely say the same thing if I was hiking alone…as if the big trees and ferns or the mountains might answer back.

Since today is Earth Day, I thought I'd post a number of recent photographs I have made when I saw something that prompted me to stop, and to respond, either verbally or photographically -- most likely,  both.

Above are two pictures from the property where we live. Below are images from a hike two friends and I did in the nearby Olympic Mountains, starting out in lush, green forest and climbing up and up above the clouds into the alpine high country. It was a day of many WOW moments.

 

A Mountain Life

For those of us in the American West who own hiking boots or mountain bikes or skis, it is a generally-accepted fact of life that there is no such thing as a bad day in the mountains.

If you don't believe it, I offer five photographs today as proof.

Most weeks I spend at least one day getting high -- hiking up, up, up into the mountains, I mean. More often than not I go with a friend or two or three, and we just have a hell of a time -- talking or not-talking,  but always enjoying the peace of the woods and the wild places.

Just being.

I shot the above photograph on one of two hikes a friend and I did last weekend in the Wallowa Mountains of northeast Oregon. The pictures below presented themselves yesterday as three buds and I trekked in Central Washington near Lake Wenatchee.

This is a wonderful part of the world where I live, and I will never, ever,  not feel fortunate for the life I have.

Nature's Ways

I have a wedding to photograph tomorrow evening and it will be held in a sweet little park on the east side of the Olympic Mountains not far from where I live.  I'm sure that, as the bride and groom planned their event, they hoped for good weather because Hood Canal is nearby and there is a peaceful beach where wedding guests could gather to watch the sunset.

I've been keeping my eye on the weather forecasts; and though, for two months we have had no real precipitation to speak of -- there was a 30-second shower Tuesday that produced the rainbow above -- we might finally get some rain tomorrow. Nevertheless I suspect my wedding clients will happily hold their ceremony indoors in a quaint and cozy cabin on the park grounds, not complaining one bit if it rains on their big day. Our land is dry, dry, dry and we all know that "perfect" weather is not perfect.

All of the photographs I'm posting today were shot this week, offering a visual example I guess of the take-away/giveth ironies to be found in Nature:

A forest fire, caused by a lightening strike back in the Spring,  has been smoldering in the Queets Valley Wilderness in Olympic National Park, perhaps two  hundred miles away from my house. The fire flared up this summer and is taking away incredible old growth trees and putting smoke into the atmosphere.

At the same time,  that smoke is making for some dramatic and "picturesque" evening skies.

Beauty is resulting from destruction.

And, for we little humans,  I guess our wisest reaction might be to just shake our heads and be amazed.

Extremes

Anyone who has spent time in an alpine landscape can tell you that the mountains often are an environment of extremes: The sun is more intense up high than it is at sea level;  winds in the mountains can knock you off your feet; and a chilly day in the lowlands can feel bone-chilling and frigid up high.

This past winter was a very light snow year in the Cascade Mountains, and this summer has been unusually hot and dry. High country hikes where I'd typically expect to find snow, even in July, take me this summer to a landscape that is bare and dry.

There has only been one day of rain in the last six weeks in the lowlands near Seattle, and lawns and gardens in populated areas are brown. Of more concern --  to me at least -- is that our mountains are tinder-dry, and fire danger in our forests is extreme. Two weeks ago I hiked in the Olympic Mountains,  and the landscape (photo above) looked more like the arid American Southwest than the rainy and green Pacific Northwest.

I shot the two photographs below last Sunday when three friends and I hiked at Rainy Pass (not aptly-named this dry summer) in the North Cascades. Part of the day I could see and photograph the dramatic peaks that surrounded us.  When the wind shifted from the southeast, however, haze and smoke filled the atmosphere, stark evidence of a wildfire that was burning near Lake Chelan about 50 miles away.

Seeing Snow

One of the little-known benefits of owning hiking boots is that they can be conveyances that allow me to travel back in time.

Don't believe me?  Do you think I'm pulling your leg? Well just check out these pictures from the hike my friends and I did in Central Washington Sunday.  We began at a fairly low elevation near the Teanaway River where wildflowers were blooming and temperatures were Spring-like, shirtsleeves warm. A couple of hours later we'd climbed up, up, up into fresh snow…and WINTER!

See, time travel?

The new snow  -- and there must have been about a foot that had fallen recently on the peak we climbed -- was great to see because all winter long folks here in Washington have been lamenting a low snow pack in our mountains.  We need snow here, both as a kind of insurance policy against summertime wildfires, and as meltwater in coming months to feed rivers and streams that are part of an intricate web of irrigation systems for agriculture.

Next time you eat an apple grown in Washington or drink beer made from our hops, think snow. It is an essential part of the food this state's farmland produces for the rest of the nation.

Gifts

I kind of had to laugh about the irony in an email conversation my hiking friends and I were having last week as we made plans for where we'd hike on Sunday.  A number of possible destinations were proposed by various geezer-ly members of our group, then dismissed, not because the hikes would be too long and difficult for humans of our advanced ages (most of the people I hike with are pushing 60, some are already there, while the biggest go-getter among us is 72.)  Rather,  the proposals were poo-poo'd because the trips sounded too easy.

I guess 60 is the new 20.

The above story is something my friends and I completely understand suggests our mutual great, good fortune: Not only do we live in a part of the world where, on any given day,  we have dozens of places were we can go play outside and take-in the kind of natural and varied wonderfulness you see in these scenes I photographed Sunday. We also are blessed with good health so that we can get to those places, on foot, usually with smiles on our faces.

We know that we are lucky old dudes and dudettes, and that each day is a gift.

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!

Smitten

After all the trips we’ve done together,  my hiking friends can now probably just about predict when they’ll hear me say it.

The trail we’re on crests a rise and we get our first, full-on view of an amazing string of peaks; or, in late fall or early winter we enter a chilly high country basin already filled with snow, and the winds have blown the frosty white stuff into incredible sculpted patterns.

And for the umteen-billionth time I say what I always say, week after week, hiking season after hiking season when we’re in some take-your-breath-away wild outdoor place:

“Man I LOVE where I live!”

And, really, can you blame me? I’ve lived in Washington state for 35 years now,  and its mountains, green forests, desert country, and ocean beaches are so varied and offer such sweet eye candy to feed my photographic soul, I can’t help but gush.

I am smitten by this place.

Speechless Babble

I did a three-day, two-night backpack trip in the North Cascades last week, and the 22-mile round trip outing humbled me -- not because the hike was too difficult for me (it wasn’t,) or because I did not make good photographs (I came away with a number of images I like very much.)

I was humbled, rather, because I was in the kind of environment that made me feel small and insignificant.  It was BIG country that I visited, with towering, cathedral-like peaks,  and deep, heavily forested valleys.  There were spectacularly beautiful larch trees, too, their needles brilliant yellow and gold in Fall color.  At every turn in the trail, every time I crested a rise or dropped into a lake basin, there was something visually stunning.

I spent three days, often speechless, sometimes babbling to myself like a crazy person: “Wow. Wow. Wow.”

Gone 'Round the Bend

Two friends and I made a trip to Bend, Oregon last weekend, a Pacific Northwest outdoor mecca I had never visited before, which is weird, because that North Central Oregon locale is My Kind of Place. There are a b'zillion trails and beautiful, snowy peaks in the Bend area, so that one can hike, mountain bike, or climb by day. And by night, Bend has enough brewpubs to keep a thirsty outdoor guy or gal smiling for a lifetime.

It is a six-hour drive from Seattle to Bend, so the area is much further afield than I prefer to travel when I have a hankerin’ to play outside. I try to be aware of my carbon footprint, you see, so North Central Oregon is not a place I’ll visit too often.  But, if you look at the pictures I’m posting today...well,  you’ll perhaps understand why this photographer does hope one day to go back.

I shot the above image on Sunday on the rim of the summit crater of South Sister, which, at 10, 358 feet of elevation,  is the third highest peak in Oregon. The first picture, below, is sunset that same evening in Bend.

The other images were made Monday morning at Smith Rock, a place that one could spend years and years photographing and still barely do it justice.

What a weekend!