This is the view of the valley of the Elwha River from Hurricane Ridge. The Elwha River runs down through the middle of the Olympic National Park. All these valleys were behind the Glines Canyon Dam for over 100 years. With the removal of the dam, all of these rivers are now wild and the salmon and steelhead runs are returning.
This is the Elwha River from the bridge next to Altair Campground in Olympic National Park. This was an area between the two dams on the river that have now been removed. I like the way the ridge lines head down in the same direction as the river and the clouds add drama to the sky. This was taken with my Nikon D-850 … so a digital camera. I converted the image to Black and White (B&W) using Adobe Lightroom Classic. I like converting color images to B&W instead of shooting B&W film. With film you would need to use multiple filters to get this same image … and not have a way to check the image before processing. In the computer, you can adjust each color channel to get the effect you want.
Above is the Elwha River Road (Olympic National Park) … a section that is past the barricade due to a washout. Below is one of the roads in Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend … one that is open only to pedestrians and bicyclists (and service vehicles). In both cases, vehicles on the road would have left tire tracks in the frost or the needles blown down during a wind storm.
I have been going through old photos and running them through my current editing software. It makes an amazing difference. Both of these are taken in Geyser Valley which is now about 6 miles from the end of the (washed out) Elwha River Road in the Olympic National Park. The one above is one I merged into a panorama from images I took on New Years Eve 2001. Below is one I took a hundred yards (meters) or so from the top photo in the summer. The undergrowth (below) is mostly vanilla leaf.
There’s a wide range of trails in the Olympic National Park. Some are well maintained (see below), and some and not so well maintained (like this one). The above image shows the ‘trail’ running above the Elwha Basin to the Elwha Snowfinger and Dodwell-Rixon Pass … one access point for one of the classic backcountry traverses of the Olympics (the Bailey Range Traverse). While I would have liked the basin trail to be well maintained … while we were hiking it … if all the trails were wide and well-maintained, there would be much larger numbers of people hiking them. There are few areas where one can still experience the solitude of nature … lack of trail maintenance protects this solitude. Trail maintenance just needs to be fully funded … there are millions of dollars of maintenance that is backlogged. The trail below is a section of the trail to the Enchanted Valley … another extremely popular destination.
