This was taken after the first snowfall of the season (in September) near the visitor center on the east side of the summit of Logan Pass on the Going to the Sun Highway in Glacier National Park. It was digging for food … just a last snack before hibernation. Not sure if it was after roots or a marmot.
I was going through some trip photos from a few years back and found these. They aren’t ‘perfect’ in their focus … which is why you haven’t seen them before. But when I reviewed them, the focus didn’t worry me as much as immediately after taking them. Expectations change with time. With the color image, I especially like the very out of focus mountains in the distance.
Mt Pilchuck is a very easy to spot mountain east of Everett, Washington (twenty some miles north of Seattle). This was just after New Year’s Day a couple years ago and shows the low snowpack that year. Normally, this would have been a struggle without snowshoes or cross-country skis … we had our snowshoes with us and we wore them for a while, but mostly because we could and then wouldn’t have to carry them.
This was an exploration of some remote backcountry in central Oregon. I was driving my old Grand Cherokee and watching those clouds for signs of additional snow. I really like having a GPS that shows the track of how I got where I am. It’s reassuring that I would be able to get back to where I started.
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.
