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).
