The photo above is Happy Lake … a seldom visited spot in the Olympic National Park. The Happy Lake Ridge Trail is seldom hiked, but it a wonderful loop hike, ending at Olympic Hot Springs. It’s a longer hike now … since the road is washed out 5 miles or so before the Olympic Hot Springs trailhead. Happy Lake was quite buggy … but mid-July tends to be that way. Notice the left over snow and the Avalance Lilies.
Hart Lake in LaCrosse Basin is another beautiful area in the Olympic National Park that is difficult to access. It is a couple days of hiking to get there … and, of course, another couple to get back out. With a day to enjoy the area, that makes a 5 day hike at a minimum. The remoteness means fewer people … a real bonus, as far as I’m concerned.
To illustrate the difficulty in access (besides the distance), below is an image I took of the fording of the Duckabush River (it’s lots bigger by the time it reaches it’s mouth). The water is icy cold and just below this area, drops over a falls.
I don’t have a lot of images from when I was a kid … this is one of the few. I went with my Aunt Maisie and Uncle Dave up to Spirit Lake at Mt St Helens in June 1961. The top section of St Helens is now AWOL and Spirit Lake is totally different. The boat trip was a charter boat we took for a ride around the lake. The funny part of the camping trip was our arrival late at night on Friday. We set up camp in the dark, where we could find an open spot. We woke to find we had pitched our tent in the parking lot.
By the way, my Uncle Dave was who got me seriously interested in photography. This was about the time that he set me up with a darkroom and gave me his old Argus C-3 35mm rangefinder. However, this image was taken with a Kodak Brownie (a Hawkeye, I believe).
Goose Lake is in the very northeast corner of California, just south of Lakeview, Oregon. There isn’t much water these days … although in the winter/early spring there can be a very shallow covering (some years). You can see a small patch of water in the far right corner.
This is one of my oldest digital images … shot with an Olympus E-10 over 20 years ago. I love the dimples in the water’s surface from the reeds and grasses. An example too of how an overcast sky can provide good light … a clear sky with a sharp reflection would have resulted in a much different image.