The previous post showed the smoke from the Bear Gulch fire being blown into the Hurricane Ridge area of the Olympic National Park where we were hiking. Before the smoke got dense, there were some interesting shots available showing atmospheric effects from lesser amounts of smoke. The image above is looking east across the Elwha River valley to the Bailey Range and just the very top of Mt Olympus. Below is from the same time/location but looking south down the valley of the Elwha.
Recently we went for a hike up in the Hurricane Ridge area of Olympic National Park, which is at the opposite end of the park from the Bear Gulch fire area. The wind was blowing from the south, however and over the course of the couple hours we hiked the smoke blew in up the Elwha Valley (image center). On the return trip, I was stunned at how the smoke had built up (we had been hiking in the woods where there was no view to the south). Below is a photo from the same location, about an hour and a half later than the top image.
This is taken from the Slab Camp trail out of Deer Park in the Olympic National Park. The valley you are looking directly up is the Upper Gray Wolf. The ridge line on the left side of the image is Gray Wolf Ridge. I was stuck by the regular ridges running down from the main ridge to the right of the Gray Wolf. Cameron Creek runs along the base of that ridge.
This is a section of the North Fork Skokomish trail about 5 miles from the trailhead at Staircase Ranger Station at the southeast corner of the Olympic National Park. I have hiked this trail dozens of times and it remains a favorite. This is a particularly nice section of trail … fairly level and dry. This was taken mid-summer … this time of year it’s likely to require snowshoes to get to this point … even though the elevation isn’t very high. The narrow mountain valleys get more snow than the lowlands, even at similar elevations.
Just looking through my old hiking images and found a couple of shots that I took while taking a water break. The top one shows a lush area that gets plenty of water and the bottom shows a much drier area showing rhododendron growing in deep woods in a relatively dry area.
