I built up a little backlog during the month of April so here’s a quick hit series of photos.
Big Four Mountain
Skykomish River Valley near Sultan
Sunset from Monroe
Mount Baker Ski Area Vicinity
I also made this timelapse from my lofty perch above the Skykomish River valley:
I am a glutton for punishment, and this winter has more than proven this to be true. I returned to Artist Point near Mount Baker for the fourth time this winter hoping for great light and interesting conditions. I had no reason to think that things would go any different than two of my previous three outings. The weather forecasts projected 63% cloud cover around the time of sunset thanks to an advancing storm front. The best light and drama happens during these transitional times such as this; I just threw my hands up and said why not?
As you might imagine, the snowshoe trip out to the ridge gets pretty routine after three previous trips in such a relatively short period. The snow was a weird conglomeration of rain altered, fresh snow, and hoar frost. We made decent time on the hike and arrived at the end of the ridge about 3 hours before sunset. While Mount Shuksan largely enjoyed sunny skies, Mount Baker had a persistent cloud layer hugging its northeast flanks. In addition to taking photos, I wanted to continue to experiment with the time lapse features of my GoPro Hero 3. Upon arrival, I set up GoPro on my panning Ikea kitchen time and set off a 20 minute timelapse of Mount Shuksan:
After this one finished, I set up for another time lapse, this time focused on Mount Baker. I wanted to shoot this for a similar amount of time (20-30 minutes) but I had to cut it short because some snowshoers appeared from nowhere below my vantage point. Lucky for me, they were out of frame and I was able to stop recording before they appeared. The clouds were starting to drift through the area more and more. This was my sign to switch over to my SLR.
During the middle part of the afternoon, I focused on the Mount Baker area since the clouds were more dynamic. The sun was directly overhead and that proved to be a bit problematic. The sunlight was bleeding into the upper portion of my frame despite the fact that I was using my telephoto’s lens hood. To overcome this issue, I decided to use my 0.6 graduated ND filter. This is hardly an exact science so there were a series of trial and error shots to finally get the hang of compensating for the light bleed. We had heard some rockfall coming of the backside of the Shuksan Arm at one point in the afternoon. Needless to say, a large boom from the direction of Mount Shuksan had both of us swinging our cameras around. All that we could capture was a billowing cloud of snow rising up from the Lower Curtis Glacier area.
As the afternoon got later, the weather was following the projected forecasts rather closely. Stronger cloud bands were now lingering around Mount Shuksan, often obscuring the summit period for brief periods of time. Mount Baker would prove to be more elusive the rest of the afternoon and brief glimpses of the summit or one of it’s flanks was the norm. We were still blessed with a rather large open “window” in the sky to the right of Mount Baker so the changing light of sunset did reach Mount Shuksan. The slopes where we were located had widespread amounts of hoar frost and I really wanted to capture this in some manner and I tried to do this with a curvy slope just below our spot on the ridge. In order to get the composition, I had to include the sun directly in the frame. I realized there would be some lens flare in the photos but it turned out to be a bit more than I would have liked.
In the minutes leading up to the actual time of sunset, we lost good light and color on Mount Shuksan and just plain lost Mount Baker. The last good light left was interacting with clouds hovering between Lasiocarpa Ridge and Skyline Divide. As most sunsets go, however, the light slowly faded away and the cold gray of night was taking over. In fact, just minutes after official sunset, clouds began QUICKLY overtaking our ridge. It was a little startling, actually. I didn’t want to be hiking back along the ridge by braille and thankfully this didn’t happen. I had a couple night photos in mind prior to our trip and the clouds put the kibosh on those plans. Still- after three mostly failed attempts, this day felt pretty good!
Lately I’ve a a run of photographic bad luck. Before Christmas, I visited Mount Rainier National Park and came away with no photos. I followed that up this past weekend with a hike up to Artist Point for sunset. Forecasts called for clearing skies an hour before sunset so dramatic skies could be in play. I was welcomed by wind and near whiteout conditions at Artist Point. Adding insult to injury, the skies did begin to clear out but that happened well after I had turned around and made it back to my truck. I couldn’t get shut out a third time, could I? To test that theory, I returned to Artist Point on New Years Day where the forecast was for “mostly clear” skies. On my way there, I couldn’t help but stop along Highway 9 to photograph the Twin Sisters Mountains. As I have learned, clear skies and sunshine may not be great for color photographs but they can be great for black & white photos.
I arrived at the Heather Meadows parking lot at the Mount Baker Ski Area and skies weren’t clear. To be more specific, they were “mostly overcast” and actually trending towards cloudy. Where the hell did this come from?? A bad omen but I still had a couple hours til sunset so anything could happen. Doning my snowshoes and a sense of deja vu, I headed yet again up towards Artist Point. It looked like many other people had the same idea (watching sunset from Artist Point) because I noticed just as much uphill traffic as people heading down. After a couple more days of sun and no new snowfall, the snowshoe routes were packed down a bit more and quicker. Even with the 30+ pounds of crap in my backpack, I made good time and reached the Artist Point parking lot in 1 hour 15 minutes (roughly 1.3 miles and ~1,000 feet of gain). The route up to Artist Point is, for the most part, benign but I am constantly shaking my head in disbelief as I watch people hike the direct route up towards Huntoon Point through the most dangerous terrain possible. The ridge between Huntoon Point and Artist Point gets SEVERELY wind loaded. Now throw in the switchbacks of the summertime road and you now have terrain traps. You’re asking for trouble by crossing this zone. In fact, in 2003 three people were caught in a slab avalanche which ultimately killing one of them. This is why I always head straight towards the parking lot, taking the short, steep headwall just left of the Blueberry Chutes or contouring around the headwall and doubling back at the first chance.
Anyways, at Artist Point, I admired the view south down the Swift Creek valley towards Baker Lake but also lamented the change in the weather. It was now completely overcast everywhere except towards the far south. My dreams for a colorful sunset were dashed. I still had time to kill before sunset so I headed out towards Huntoon Point. Along the way, I scoped out the various trees encased in ice just like the trees in the Finnish Lapland. Eventually, I topped out on Huntoon Point’s 5,247 foot summit. Despite skies which still weren’t clearing out, I was determined to take at least some photos. I began my hike back towards Artist Point but stopped along the way to photograph the gigantic ice trees. One grove in particular hand a number of interestingly shaped limbs which I used to frame Mount Baker in the distance.
The only color to be seen was over 50 miles to the south/southeast and so I made the judgement call to head back to my original viewpoint over the Swift Creek drainage where I figured I could come up with some sort of composition. I passed another couple enjoying the views with some hot beverage and set up my camera to begin shooting. After a while, the couple near me headed back to their car and the clouds above Mount Baker had the faint hint of reflected color. More time went by and the color began to slowly build up. I couldn’t believe it- the color turned a fiery, vibrant red! I was cold to the point of my teeth almost chattering but I quickly attacked the developing scene in front of me. This metamorphosis of color lasted about 15 minutes. It faded away and I felt extremely lucky to have witnessed it. I should know better, especially since I have been witness to these types of displays before. None the less, it always leaves me in awe when it does happen.
Awe doesn’t keep you warm so it was time to go! It was already dark enough to don my headlamp for the hike out. My hike out was peaceful except for the crunch of snow beneath my snowshoes. Across the Bagley Lakes basin, I could make out the headlamps of two skiers making an ascent of Mount Herman for some night time turns. This was a fabulous way to start the new year!
This past weekend I visited the Thorton Lakes region within the North Cascades National Park. I’ve never been there before but the promise of good views (including north towards the Southern Picket Range) was too intriguing. The great views don’t come without a price. The hike follows an old logging road for a few miles before bringing a steady uphill slog. Five miles and 2,500 vertical feet later, the ridge surrounding the Thorton Lakes basin is reached. From this point, a half mile and 500 foot descent takes you to the offical campground along the shores of Lower Thorton Lakes. The other option is a steep, climbers trail up towards the summit of Trappers Peak.
My primary interest was to stick around for sunset but I also wanted to get up Trappers Peak for those good views of the Thorton Lakes and the Southern Picket Range to the north. I was taking a little bit of a chance heading here because I didn’t have much intel about falls colors. I scoured older trip reports on NWHikers.net to get a sense of what might be possible but the results weren’t conclusive. Making matters worse, a recent trip report from Cascade Pass showed great fall color. My decision was to roll the dice and still head for Thorton Lakes.
The access road off of Highway 20 is fairly rough with several washboard sections but not impossible for passenger vehicles. The old road section turned trail is a nice warm up for the steady ascent to come. Once the trail turns away from the Thorton Creek valley, the trail suddenly becomes very quiet. Views out from the forest don’t really exist save for some fleeting glimpses across the valley at Big Devil Peak. After the trail crosses the Park Service boundary, it enters a small bowl below the ridge that surrounds the lakes. A hiker on their way down told us we had 20 minutes left until we reached the ridge. It didn’t seem believable but- it was.
I received my first disappointment upon reaching the trail junction between the path down to the lake and the path up to the peak. I expected the ridge to be much more open than it actually was. Instead of smaller subalpine trees, the ridge contains mostly larger trees with few unobstructed views down towards Lower Thorton Lake. If I was to get shots of the lake, they would have to be from the trail up towards Trappers Peak.
The next bit of disappointment was the lighting. The goal was to shoot sunset so we started our hike in the afternoon. By the time we gained the ridge, the sun had traversed far to the west. To photograph the west side of the basin, I had to point my camera into the sunlight and this adds a significant amount of haze to the photos. These two factors alone stopped me from trying to photograph the lake. With the late afternoon, I was beginning to realize that Trappers Peak would not be a reachable destination. Time and exertion would tap me out before I could get into a great position for photos.
There was still some time before the “magic hour” of light before sunset and that was enough to attempt to climb up to the intermediate knoll between the ridge and the summit. This led to my next disappointment of the day. While information on the internet states that there is a trail to the summit, it does elude to the fact that there are some “interesting” sections of the trail. The ascent up to the intermediate knoll is one such section. The crux of this section is where the trail ascends a 100 foot tall gully. Climbing the gully is generally class I-II but a specific move or two might be considered class III. I found it to be serious enough that I wasn’t as comfortable with the thought of down climbing this section after the sunset.
Sunset was still a little ways off which meant there was no reason not to hike “just a little further.” I really wanted to get my glimpse of the Southern Picket Range. After a few false benches, I turned a corner and got my glimpse. I got a few quick shots and then hurried back down to return to a spot further down the ridge for sunset. As we down climbed, I saw a side path which finally gave a relatively unencumbered view of Lower Thorton Lakes. Even though the sun had set enough to cast the entire basin in shade, getting a nice shot of the scene was still a challenge. Warm sunset light was really starting to show off on the rugged ridges back across the Skagit River to our south so I didn’t spend much time on the lakes. Another time, I suppose..
To the west, a few high clouds added some interest in the warm, orange light. To our south and the east, that light was more pinkish but with clear skies. The best displays were located to the east on the upper slopes in the vicinity of Paul Bunyan’s Stump and towards the southeast near Eldorado Peak and Klawatti Peak. The lack of any rain in the region has allowed for the development of some haze which really accentuates colors during sunsets. Even with this haze, we were able to clearly see Whitehorse Mountain and Three Fingers 36 miles to the southwest.
About a half hour after official sunset, the colors in the earth shadow subsided and it was time to hike out. I was not looking forward to this since I had some concerns about following the trail on the way back out in the dark. Below the ridge, the forest proper isn’t heavily vegetated so there were a few times when it was quite easy to make a turn off trail. Thankfully, we managed to make the descent back to the decommissioned road without any navigational incidents. We reached the trailhead a little bit more than 2 hours after leaving the ridge.
The day didn’t quite go as I expected but that seems to be my modis operandi. I’ll return at some point but for now, I think it’s time to hunt down some fall color..
There’s not much for me to say about Mazama Ridge in Mount Rainier National Park that I haven’t said in previous years here and here. Last weekend I made the trip down to view the wildflowers which were probably beginning their peak week. Great time as always and I ran into a few fellow photographers I’ve interacted with online over the last couple years.
As I hiked out after sunset, the low clouds that persisted all day at lower elevations finally began creeping up the Stevens Creek valley towards Reflection Lakes saddle. I stopped for a couple quick photos on the ridge and at Faraway Rock-
Auroras are trademarks of the high latitudes such as Alaska, Norway, and Canada. It is much rarer to see them at the lower latitudes of places like Seattle. After a tremendous solar burst last week, that’s exactly what was forecasted for the weekend. Sometime in the early 2000s, I saw some aurora activity from the front yard of my house in Everett and it was mesmerizing. I desperately wanted to capture the auroras above some of our fine northwest scenery.
There have been some near misses in terms of seeing auroras over the last couple years and that gave me some time to figure out where to go. Over time, I finally found my “spot” in the Baker Lake vicinity of Mount Baker. My location looked to have a great view of both Mount Shuksan and Mount Baker and was fairly accessible. Predictably, the weather slowly degraded as Saturday arrived. Clouds would be bad enough but persistent afternoon thunderstorms in the mountains really threatened to ruin any chance we had.
As the afternoon went on, the storm activity seemed to tail off and so we gave it a go. Surprisingly, the Forest Service roads were bone dry; the thunderstorms never dropped their payload in this area. Despite some concerns about having to hike on snow to our destination, everything ended up being snow free. Even better, the site I had researched turned out to be great. Mount Baker remained cloaked behind thick clouds but Mount Shuksan had a horizontal slit across its mid flanks. I think the struggling optimists inside of us hoped that the pockets of blue sky were the beginnings of a clear night sky.
Below us, the Baker Lake valley was filling with clouds and gradually creeping up the valley sides. Sunset drew closer and closer bringing color to the various clouds across the sky. As daylight continued to fade, so did our hopes for clear skies in this area. After sunset, the clouds finally swallowed us whole. It was still early enough to come up with a Plan B. It was tough but some reports of clear skies back down in Snohomish County lured us back closer to home. The Mount Pilchuck trail head was our Plan B and two hours of driving later, we were there.
Clear skies were directly overhead but clouds filled the northern skies. no auroras were visible to the naked eye. Or were they?…..While taking some night shots, my peripheral vision seemed to catch a shimmer in the sky. Clouds were still thick so I wasn’t sure what I saw. On one of my shots, there was a small green orb. The auroras! Sadly, that would be all that we would see. It was now pushing 2am; we now accepted the bitterness of defeat and drove home. Hopefully soon, the skies will cooperate and we will capture the auroras. One of these days…
I spent Friday and Saturday night’s out with my girlfriend chasing sunset in the Cascades. In both cases, the sunset’s came up short and meekly went away. It should come as NO surprise that Sunday evening, while sitting at the computer working on something, my girlfriend came up to me and asked, “Steve, do you have your camera? Come quick!..”
Sure enough, I get to the back porch to see an enormous radii of god rays and layers upon layers of puffy clouds. Ah yes- the sunset I wanted came a day late. Monroe gets some fantastic sunset light but (honestly) doesn’t have much going for it for foreground compositions. The best thing I could do was walk over to the ball fields behind Frank Wagner Elementary and maximize the sky in my photos. Enjoy!..
It was three hours until sunset and this is how things were shaping up. What to do? After finishing up my hike to Ramona Falls, this was my dilemma. Although the mountain was fairly socked in, you can see that there is a tall lenticular cloud structure building up behind it. I decided that, when sunset did come, the lenticular cloud was probably going to be highlight. Clearly from this vantage point, I wasn’t going to see much; i needed to move but where? On the first day of my trip, I drove the entire length of Lolo Pass Road to the actual pass and this gave me the knowledge of where I could photograph the mountain, and what to expect. From this simple action, I now knew that I should head to the last viewpoint nearest the pass. It situated me in a more northerly position instead of the northwesterly position that the photo above was taken at. As I drove to my destination, I passed another photographer who had staked his claim not far from where I was previously. I had to smile because I knew that my destination was going to be better suited for what was to come. Boy was I right! The next hour until sunrise was a photographing frenzy. I kept alternating shots between my Sigma 17-70mm lens and my Pentax DA 55-300. The colors from sunset definitely not the best I’ve ever seen but the cloud movement and dynamics certainly were. The wind currents kept changing the view in front of me, almost like shaking an Etch-A-Sketch. True to my hunch, the tall lenticular cloud behind Mount Hood acted like a magnet for any of the colors of sunset. Minute by minute, there was always something to photograph. Like many sunsets, this one just faded away without fanfare. I honestly didn’t expect much of a sunset but I was dead wrong. I’m just glad that I had done a little bit of homework to put me in the best possible position to take advantage of it!
This past weekend brought the sun-starved Northwest a magnificent weekend. Lot’s of sun and warm (ok, spring-like) temperatures. Hallelujah! How did I celebrate this momentous weekend? By visiting the deep winter snowpack, of course. To be more specific, I wanted to shoot sunset from Artist Point. I’ve meant to do it all winter but things just haven’t come together like this weekend. As luck would have it, a full moon would also be rising after sunset in the vicinity of Mount Shuksan. Winning!
I grabbed a friend and we made our way up to the Mount Baker Ski Area. I always have the best plans in mind when I start but good ‘ole Murphy makes an appearance. The hike from the ski area parking lot up to Artist Point takes me a little more than an hour, and another half hour to make it out to Huntoon Point. Our start time of 6:15pm didn’t bode well (sunset was at 7:50pm). At 7:10pm, we were about halfway up the last steep pitch below the Artist Point. The light was entering the “magic hour” but we clearly weren’t where we had hoped to be.
After some debate, we decided to settle down nearby so we didn’t miss any photo opportunities. While we couldn’t get a view of Mount Baker, we still had a great view of Mount Shuksan as well as the many peaks to the north and northwest. The high slopes of Mount Shuksan absorbed some nice, warm orange light before it quietly faded into the coming night. Some occasional winds chilled us to the core and I began to evaluate the second component of our evening- moonrise. Apparently I misread my moonrise app and thought moonrise was at 9:12pm (roughly an hour wait). When I checked the time again, it was 9:42pm.
Neither of us relished the idea of waiting close to 90 minutes up here for the moon to rise so we decided on Plan B. It was too dangerous to (cross county) ski back down to the parking lot so we walked out instead. My friend originally thought we should take our moonrise photos from Picture Lake buuutttt the 25 foot high snowbanks surrounding the lake convinced him otherwise. I knew of a particular turnout along the highway between the lower and upper lodge which has a nice full view of Mount Shuksan so that’s where we headed.
I stamped out a platform in the roadside snowbank and set up my camera. In addition to moonrise shots, I wanted to get a photo of the stars above the mountain so that’s what I worked on. One common technique is to take two photos, one photo taken with a high ISO to capture the stars in the sky and then a second photo at low ISO to capture your foreground of interest. The two different photos are then blended together in Photoshop to come up with your finished photo. In order to keep the stars “stationary” in your photos, the exposure times have to be no more than 20-30 seconds. The high ISO (1600 and above) and a wide open aperature of F2.8 is what makes this happen.
Provided you have a newer camera, this is the easy part! The harder part, at least for me, is determining the length of exposure for the foreground part of the photo. Using an ISO like 100 requires a lengthy exposure time to sufficiently expose the scene. I haven’t practiced night sky photography enough so I have to experiment to get things right. Many cameras have a “feature” built into them to reduce noise on long exposures. This is accomplished by taking a second photo after your first photo for the same length of time, but as a black image. The theory is that any noise becomes apparent and the camera can then subtract that from the first image taken.
The problem with long exposure noise reduction is that for a 4 minute exposure, you have to wait another 4 minutes for the black reference image to be taken. This makes it difficult to hone in a proper exposure through trial and error. Most cameras allow you to disable the noise reduction feature so this is recommended since you can do a better job using Adobe Camera Raw and third party plugins within Photoshop. I experimented for about an hour but it was clear the moon wasn’t going to crest above Mount Shuksan anytime soon due to a low trajectory. We still had close to a 3 hour drive home so we hurried to pack up and get going. After dropping off my friend, I finally got home at close to 2am.
I wasn’t all that excited at the time about the photos I shot but I changed my tune as I spent time processing them. It turned out to be a great caper on the day.
I stayed closer to home this weekend and decided to check out the potential for a new spot I found via Google Earth. Gunn Peak, Merchant Peak, and Baring Mountain are the most recognizable peaks in the Skykomish River valley foothills. Due to their prominence, they can capture and reflect the golden light of sunset. The valley in this area is fairly narrow with some level of terracing. During my searches with Google Earth, I spied a small hill in a clearcut that appeared to be easy to access.
It was only a 25 minute drive so I gambled with Saturday’s sunset to check it out. I haven’t spent much time in this area, mostly because of a controversial gate issue associated with a Forest Service Road (FS Rd 62). It’s a public road but one that provides access to the checkerboard of private ownership that exists in some portions of the central Cascades of Washington State. The timber company who owns these in-holdings expressed concerns to the Forest Service in the past about the danger to its employees from (illegal) target shooting. To the dismay of many, the Forest Service allowed the timber company to eliminate public access to one of it’s own roads.
Anyways, in the last year or so, the interim gate closure was finally eliminated and access has been restored. I have to admit, though, that I’m still a bit leery of the gate and still feel the idea of being “locked in”. I went for it anyways, and was soon parked at the gate to the secondary spur road that I would be walking up to reach my destination. It was an easy 10-15 minute walk and I was soon greeted with a nice, expansive view of the valley below me.
On my far right was the impressive north face of Mount Index’s North Peak. The left side of my panoramic view was highlighted by Jumpoff Ridge and it’s most notable summits- Gunn and Merchant Peak. Finally, the sloping summit of Baring Mountain and Klinger Ridge were visible further up the South Fork Skykomish River valley. It was quite breezy and clouds were shading Jumpoff Ridge when I first arrived. I was on site about an hour before sunset so I had plenty of time to wait for conditions to change.
Luckily, they did change and the sun broke through the clouds as sunset drew closer. This particular sunset was only a six on a 1 to 10 scale but I really only wanted to check the spot out; anything beyond that would have been pure gravy! As summer gets closer and the days get longer, I might be visiting this spot more since it is so close and easy to visit..
