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.
This is another example of mist blowing over the Olympic Mountain ridges. This one didn’t have the sun backlighting the clouds and has a lot darker tones. This is up the North Fork Skokomish.
There are a lot of clouds in the Olympic Mountains … it takes all those clouds to give you the rain forest valleys. And even if the valley is on the downwind side of the peninsula, you still have the clouds. You just end up with less rain coming down from them. Having spent so much time in the Olympics, I guess it’s not surprising that I’m attracted to cloudy ridgelines. This one was taken up the valley of the Dosewallips. The sun had just disappeared into the bright area in the upper left and it started to sprinkle shortly later. Never very hard, but enough to get things (and people) damp.
The dead trees are a result of a forest fire several years before … one that made a mess of the Lake Constance trail … already one of the more difficult hikes in the Olympics, now even more difficult due to so many trees having fallen across the trail. It is still used quite a bit, though, as it is one of the popular approaches to climb Mt Constance (the highest Olympic peak visible on the Seattle skyline).
From the Deer Park area, you can look over to the Hurricane RIdge area (or take a nice long ridge walk). If you click on the image to enlarge your view, you can see the road cut that runs from Port Angeles up to the ridge.
This ridge runs between the Duckabush and West Fork Dosewallips river valleys in the Olympic National Park. But it was the clouds that attracted my attention.