I have shown photos of this pond before, but the clouds are always different. This day they were particularly dramatic.
Cloudscape
Alders and Marsh in Autumn
Alders are a lot more tolerant of wet ground around their root systems. The foreground is a very wet, marshy area that the alders can encroach on, but the firs and hemlocks can’t tolerate.
Floating Reeds
I don’t know what kind of reeds these are (hard to tell from the photo) but they sure made an interesting pattern floating on the small pond near the ‘entrance’ to Sol Duc Park. Sol Duc Park is about 7 miles up the Sol Duc Trail, most of the way to Heart Lake and part of the very popular High Divide Loop in the Olympic National Park.
Views on a Winter Walk
I was out walking in a wooded area and past a small pond. I was quite a ways from the pond … it was sitting in the bottom of a glacial karst (a depression that was left behind when a block of ice was buried and later melted). I saw these two ducks sitting on a log and liked what I could see. After zooming in with a tight crop, I liked the reflections and ripples a lot.
Just down the trail from the pond, I saw these alder (below) and liked the contrast between them and the evergreens in the background.
Beaver Pond in Winter
This pond is along the Larry Scott Trail south of Port Townsend, WA. There isn’t access to the shore of the pond … it’s all private property … so a shot through the trees is about all I could get. I’ve seen lots of water birds, an eagle perching on one of the overlooking trees, and some water critter that looked like a beaver or such. It was daytime, so the beaver answer is less than certain.
The image below was taken along this same stretch of the Larry Scott. It follows the old railroad grade and it drops off fairly sharply on either side along this section.
