Hiking along the North Fork Skokomish trail in Olympic National Park, you never know that you might see. There are the occasional sightings of elk and bear (black bear, which typically run away) and lots of smaller birds. Sometimes you see grouse… often hearing them before being able to spot them in their camouflage. This one stayed around long enough for a photo op. These have always been blue grouse to me … but they are now called Sooty Grouse in some of my books. (or both)
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.
I have often posted images of the trail up the North Fork Skokomish … or showed images of the area. I was going through photos and found this nice pair of photos about 5 miles up the trail, where it crosses a small creek. A National Park crew was installing a new bridge. With hand rails on BOTH sides! Quite nice.
Back in the ’60’s, one of my first long hikes was an attempted crossing of the Cascades using some ‘high routes’. A friend and I were going with just the two of us and (looking back on it) overly optimistic plans. The weather didn’t cooperate: we ended up getting snowed on for a day or so after the third day or so. Perhaps we were lucky that we decided to bail. The weather remained stormy for several days (it was mid-August and a cold front blew in). We hiked to the nearest road, hitched a ride into the nearest bus line. It was still an adventure … and probably safer than if we had continued. It would have been a rugged go, and I’m not sure we would have been able to keep up our schedule … even if we found the right track … since we were following ‘high routes’ for a lot of the time, we weren’t using trails. So route finding would have slowed us down … probably more than we expected.
That’s my pack and ice ax just after we departed Lucerne (Washington) a SMALL town along Lake Chelan that is boat only access. This is my only photo of the trip. Taken with a Kodak Instamatic, I believe. One of my earliest remaining images.
This image was sitting around unloved. The problem was that in color it was BORING. I was going through my past shots and hitting the “V” key (while in LIghtroom). That is a shortcut key for converting an image to Black and White. When I got to this image, I stopped. It definitely showed promise, so I spent the additional time on it to adjust it further (the default black and white conversion is pretty generic). A good reminder to never take things at first glance.
The Dosewallips River road was washed out 20 years ago, or so. This section is now closed to motor vehicles, but makes a great walk. The Dosewallips valley is on the east side of the Olympic Peninsula. It has been closed for years while they attempt to come up with a plan to reroute the road without endangering salmon in the river … and keep the cost down (since to move the road away from the river at the wash out point would be an extensive relocation up the hillside).