it is a hard life trying to find adequate food in the high country in winter. I shared some organic grains with the gray jay (even though it’s against the rules). That attracted the attention of the raven, but it was much too shy/wary to come so close.
I did a double-take on this image when I was working on it. I kept trying to make it level and was distracted by the angles of the ridges and the cloud banks … and echoed by the cloud-line in the distances. But the trees show the image is ‘straight’. This is taken from the Hurricane Hill Road just past the Hurricane Ridge Visitor center, a popular snowshoe and cross-crountry ski route.
The North Fork Skokomish valley is one of my favorite locations in Olympic National Park. It used to be the closest to my home, when I lived in Olympia. It’s a little farther away now, but I still try to make several trips per year. It’s a low snow year when you can drive up to the Staircase Trailhead in December (unlike this year).
I was downtown along the waterfront several days before Christmas and saw this scene. It reminded me of the phrase in Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, where a small boy ponders: “Can the fishes see it snowing?”
Sadly, it wasn’t actually snowing at the time, and two days later it was all gone. I think it’s nice to have snow at Christmas, as long as it isn’t so much to disrupt the festivities.
But a Happy New Years to all … here’s to a better 2023. One with less mindless killing, for one.
Lake 22 in east of the city of Everett, along the Mountain Loop Highway. It is one of the most heavily hiked trails in the Cascades. It is also the location of my first backpack trip back in the early ’60’s. I remember having to carry out the wet canvas tarp we used for a shelter … it rained and the little hollow we had set up camp in filled with water. It was only 2 miles or so downhill, but my pack weighed over 70 lbs when I got home. But that was long ago and in the summer. Nowadays, there is no overnight camping allowed. And they have added a boardwalk around most of the lake to protect the meadow areas.
(More found images from my Archive Catalog)