I have published shots from this spot before, but I was there last week again and took these from the middle of the bridge that connects the North Shore Road and the South Shore Road. While the river looks well behaved here, it recently washed out the South Shore Rd. That means a longer drive on a road that has foot deep potholes in places to get to the East Fork Quinault Trail. It is also a special treat to visit one of the major temperate rain forest valleys with such wonderful sunny weather.
We took a recent trip up to Hurricane Ridge (Olympic National Park) and were going to snowshoe, but a check on conditions showed there to be not enough snow for snowshoeing. The image above is at over 5200′ (1585m) and you can see all the exposed grasses. There’s still plenty of time to build up some snowpack to provide water for the summer, but it does concern folks. The valley running into the distance in the middle of the image is the Elwha River.
The image below is from where we turned around and walked back to the parking lot. It is looking west of the image above.
Our typical weather in winter is clouds and drizzle. When it clears off and we have sunny weather, it’s a special treat. And it can be spectacular.
Happy New Year, Everyone … and may you have many spectacular things to enjoy in the coming year.
These are a couple images that I took from a trip across to Victoria from Port Angeles on the Coho ferry. The top one is looking east to Mt Baker and the one below is looking south to the Olympic Mountains … the area just south of Port Angeles in the Hurricane Ridge area.
There are a lot of clouds in the Olympic Mountains … it takes all those clouds to give you the rain forest valleys. And even if the valley is on the downwind side of the peninsula, you still have the clouds. You just end up with less rain coming down from them. Having spent so much time in the Olympics, I guess it’s not surprising that I’m attracted to cloudy ridgelines. This one was taken up the valley of the Dosewallips. The sun had just disappeared into the bright area in the upper left and it started to sprinkle shortly later. Never very hard, but enough to get things (and people) damp.
The dead trees are a result of a forest fire several years before … one that made a mess of the Lake Constance trail … already one of the more difficult hikes in the Olympics, now even more difficult due to so many trees having fallen across the trail. It is still used quite a bit, though, as it is one of the popular approaches to climb Mt Constance (the highest Olympic peak visible on the Seattle skyline).