Here in Port Townsend, we had a record cool spring … well, I guess cold would be a better description.
The plants were still dormant much later than usual. Mowing lawns started a month or so “late”. (a silver lining, for sure) Then we had a short stretch of record setting heat and all the plants went totally crazy. It seemed like you could watch the grass growing. It also brought out a bumper crop of dandelions … at least in my yard.
Supposedly, the pickup truck above was once ‘owned’ by Charles Manson, the cult leader in the late 60’s that was convicted of a number of murders. It sits in Ballarat, a small private holding within Death Valley National Park. Ballarat has a population of one.
Below is a building that is in Ballarat. If you want to call it a building. I thought it made a nice jumble, though.
This was from a hike that my brother (shown above) and I took to Marmot Pass in the Buckhorn Wilderness area of the Olympic Mountains. He was in training to climb Mt Rainier and he was carrying several barbell weights in his pack. This was in June of 1998, I think… and it was a nice workout.
Today would have been his 80th birthday. I miss him terribly.
I saw this wild rhody blooming along the Larry Scott Trail near Port Townsend … just before PT’s big Rhody Weekend (with parade, kids’ trike race, beard contest, etc.). This is the native rhody, which is the Washington State flower. (There are a fair number of them growing in the woods along SR 19 coming into town.)
These images were all taken within a few minutes of each other from Constance Pass in the Olympics. (outside of the Olympic National Park … in the Buckhorn Wilderness) The one above is looking northeast and shows the west side of Mt Constance (on the right). Constance is the tallest peak you can see from Seattle’s view to the west.
This hike used to be a long one day hike from the Dosewallips trailhead … but the road being washed out now for 20 years or so has added an additional 6+ miles each way to the distance. The valley to the left of the image above is the upper Dungeness.
The view in the second image (above) is looking southwards … across the valley of the Dosewallips. The image below shows the view looking west towards Mt Mystery and into the Olympic National Park.
These were taken years ago, but I just found them and assembled them into panoramas. I didn’t have a lot of experience with panoramas at that time and there was no easy software fix to assemble them. That is the reason why the images are not ‘taller’. They were a little crooked … and to crop them to keep from having lots of empty space meant that they were wide and short.