This was an exploration of some remote backcountry in central Oregon. I was driving my old Grand Cherokee and watching those clouds for signs of additional snow. I really like having a GPS that shows the track of how I got where I am. It’s reassuring that I would be able to get back to where I started.
These two images show first snowfalls of the year in the North Fork Skokomish valley. The top image was taken from the bridge over the river just below the Staircase entrance to Olympic National Park. The lower image was taken from the bridge over the river to the ranger residential area and the Staircase Loop trail.
This was an early winter storm that came in while I was out walking the valley. The top of the ridge with the lowest snow is just over 3000 feet (about 915 meters). The snow stuck around on the high ground, but it was gone the next day on the trees. Mt Ellinor – Mt Washington are the southeastern most corner of the Olympic Mountains (not in Olympic National Park). There is a low point between the two summits that is obscured with clouds in this image … Ellinor is lower by several hundred feet and is on the left.
I was going through some old photos and came across these images from one of my snowshoe climbs up Mt Rose in the SE corner of the Olympic Mountains. Mt Rose is a steep climb and the top doesn’t provide much of a view, except for a slice of Lake Cushman at its bottom. I enjoyed the quiet of a solo trip to the summit on the newly fallen snow … and then down the ridge line to the saddle between Rose and Mt Ellinor, and cutting back to the midpoint of the summit trail. Very minimal avalanche danger with the trail being in woods and without open chutes. A solo snowshoe summit climb isn’t something I would do these days … but it was fantastic at the time.
This is one of the trails (and maintenance roads) at Fort Worden State Park here in Port Townsend. It is only a mile or two from my house, but the weather changes rapidly across the area – here on a peninsula sticking out into salt water (Admiralty Inlet on Puget Sound). At home there was still an inch of icy snow on the street (a cul-de-sac … so not much traffic).