This shows a part of Haines … while a small town, it is larger than shown here. This is salt water and the mountains in the background are around 7000′ (2133m) in elevation. My aunt and uncle lived here for much of their adult lives and I wintered over there in the mid-70’s. The other side of the close landform is the Chilkat River. A view upstream is below.
Point Wilson is located in Port Townsend within the boundaries of Fort Worden State Park and sits on the northeast corner of the Olympic Peninsula, where the Strait of Juan de Fuca meets Puget Sound, an area also known as Admiralty Inlet. The buildings are in need of repair … badly needed paint and the repair of other damage due to years in the weather. Below is a shot just a few feet away, on the beach, showing a lean-to that has also fallen into disrepair. No one is collecting money for the repair of the lean-to.
These shots were taken with my Pentax 643N using Portra 400 film.
These are both shots taken from the same spot on the beach at Fort Worden State Park. I just turned 90 degrees and faced south for the second shot. I was shooting Portra 400 film with my Pentax 645N. With the shot below, I exposed for the clouds and sky and the foreground was completely in shadow. I tried to ‘recover’ the details in the shadows, but it quickly became full of speckled grains … and we aren’t talking sand grains. With a digital camera, the shot below could easily have been adjusted to show normal looking details in the shadows. The technology we have these days is wonderful.
Lake 22 (TwentyTwo) is located just west of Mt Pilchuck, west of Everett, WA. in the Central Cascade foothills. The area was part of one of the very first ecological studies, in the 1949 book Pilchuck, The Life of a Mountain by Harry Higman and Earl J. Larrison. (Working my way through college in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s, I mowed the lawn and did gardening at Harry Higmans’s widow’s house.) The book is a classic and I’m happy to have a first edition print of it in my library.
This is also the site of my very first backpack trip (August 1962) … and we ended up soaking wet. The image below shows the lake surface a few minutes later from the image above, when it began to pour on us … just a brief summer shower. This time we were prepared and didn’t end up soaked. There is no overnight camping permitted at the lake anymore due to excessive usage and to protect the environment around the lake.
These two images (taken within 20 miles of each other) show a dramatic difference in growing environments. The one above shows a stand of alders in marshy bottomland … I would expect their roots are constantly wet. The one below shows an evergreen growing in a rocky area that would certainly not provide any water during summer months. The adaptive ability of trees to grow wherever there is a chance to put down roots is amazing.
