Steve Cole Photography

Spring weather in the Pacific Northwest will often hand you lemons so you’d better learn how to make lemonade. I was making plans to climb Mount St Helens this weekend but the forecasts ensured that it would be a miserable experience. I decided to work with the grey skies and take a look at the status of wildflowers at Washington Park in Anacortes. I had heard that the flowers were pretty nice last weekend so I was hoping for the best.

Washington Park is a city owned park just beyond the main ferry terminal for accessing the San Juan islands. It’s a mini-peninsula of sorts and is a forested park surrounded by rocky shoreline and the water. It’s climate is a bit unique so many of the trees along the shoreline environment exhibit much of the wind swept alterations of trees in the alpine environment or places like Monterey in California.

Upon arriving late in the afternoon, the rainy, gray skies were giving way to sunshine. I parked at the park’s entrance and began the 3 mile clockwise loop around the park. Sadly, my hopes were dashed as this year’s bloom (or just my timing) was not up to the level of my first visit two years ago. I stopped at all of my spots but large blooms were absent. Winds were the strongest I’ve experienced so the photography was really difficult. To stop the motion of the flowers, I had to boost the ISO up to 800 and that really exposes the age of my trusty Pentax DSLR. The noise and grain is fairly noticeable in a few of the images..

As I approached the halfway point of the loop, the colors of sunset began to really show:

My last stop was a spot which can have a large bloom of Shooting Stars (not this year). Sunset was in it’s last throws above the horizon. The orange hues were reflecting off of the clouds quite nicely:

In the end, it wasn’t what I was hoping for but still a great time.