The area near Hart’s Pass has always been a favorite of mine. You can drive all the way up to subalpine meadows. (once the road is open … and what a road … not for those nervous about heights)
Unfortunately, a big section of what used to be the campground that I favored most burned several years ago. It’s still nice, but it has lost some of what made it special.
I took this one a couple years back … I took a series of them, actually. I never posted this one, thinking it was too similar to the one I did post. But as I was going through my archive, I was struck by this one. I love the way it connects the two mountains.
I took this from Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington with a Nikon D850 and a 300mm lens with a 2x multiplier. Exposure was f/8 at 1/25 sec and ISO 100.
I played hooky from work one day in July 2003 and climbed up South Ingals peak. It has been one of my favorite areas in the Central Cascades … up the North Fork of the Teanaway River. That is Mt Rainier in the distance. I really liked the silver wood snag. This spot hasn’t seen any forest fires (yet), but the access road was the east perimeter of a large fire this summer. Below are some anemones growing in the rocks near where I took the upper photo.
Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that many of my photos are taken in the Olympic Peninsula. I do go other places … and I grew up spending much more time in the North Central Cascades … which were much closer to my home in North Seattle. The forest in North Cascades are much different than the rainforests of the Olympics. These were taken on the east side of the range, near Lake Chelan, about where the transition to pine forest begins.
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.