My last post showed some Rocky Mountain views and I mentioned how I prefer the mossy/ferny Olympic Mountains. Here are some trail shots from the Rockies. Nice country. The last image, however, is from the Olympic National Park and shows a typical trail. Much different.
I know … it’s the wrong time of year for autumn shots. Oh well. I was going through some older shots and saw these two trails. They were both in Montana, near Whitefish. It was middle of September, but you can see a slight dusting of snow just left of center, along the ridge line. We got into snow before we got to the top … and we were cold and tired. Fortunately, we found a ski area at the top and rode the chair lift down to where our car was parked.
This is the Kootenai River in Idaho from the Kootenai Falls Swinging Bridge. It’s just off of Highway 2 west of Libby, Montana. As you can tell from the small section of sky in the upper left, it was a cloudy day… but the trail that runs across the swinging bridge is a nice way to stretch out the legs after a day or two driving (we were going from Seattle to Whitefish … a couple long days of driving).
This tree was along the trail from Boulder Camp (in the upper Dungeness River valley) to Marmot Pass. I thought it looked like a sentinel watching over the trail. It is in the Buckhorn Wilderness outside of the Olympic National Park and is very much in the rain shadow section of the Olympic Peninsula… hence the lack of much undergrowth.
These two images were taken just a few minutes apart … the top photo was a bouquet that is in a vase mounted on a fence post, while the bottom image is just a little ways up the Larry Scott Trail. They are so different from each other, but both so beautiful.
