tree – Page 14

Bursting Forth

I love the cracked bark of old trees, it almost looks like there is another tree inside trying to burst forth. I love the texture and colors of a tree that first sprang from the earth long before I was born and will likely be around long after I’m gone. And I love how when you look closer you see the tiny spider webs and the delicate lichen and realize there are little worlds existing within this small section of this giant tree, which is just one tree in a large forest circling a massive volcano, and you feel lucky to just be standing there, a part of one little story next to a tree that could tell thousands.

Birth of an Ent

An ent is born on a foggy night with naught but the will-o’-wisps watching.

Face in the Forest

I hiked a section of the Wonderland Trail on my last full day in Mount Rainier National Park. I was exhausted from hiking on previous days with my heavy telephoto lens, and though I left it behind on this hike, the trail was an uphill slog through the forest and it was raining heavily. Making matters worse, most of the camera gear I hike with is old with no weather-sealing. Plus I discovered the hard way that my trusty old hiking boots were no longer waterproof. The clouds were so low I couldn’t even see the mountain when I reached a clearing up top, so my spirits were a little low.

On the hike back down I made myself stop and adjust my attitude. I love hiking in forests and decided my little camera was coming out in the rain, and if it died, it died. I started photographing bark and moss and was having a good time and couldn’t resist a picture of this tree that reminded me of an Olmec head (I always think of the one Mr. Burns gives Bart on the Simpsons).

The Departed Nurse

Despite its short length, the Hall of Mosses Trail in the Hoh Rain Forest provides nice views of nurse logs, fallen trees that provide a beneficial perch for seedlings to take root. As the young trees grow into giants themselves, their roots reach down around the log and into the soil. In time the log rots away, the emptiness that remains a reminder of how life for one tree began with the death of another.

The Dry Rain Forest

I recently got back from a week of hiking in Washington and made my fourth visit to the Hoh Rain Forest. My fourth dry visit to the Hoh Rain Forest. While it rained heavily during much of my trip, it was warm and sunny during my visit to the Hoh, so I’ll make a return trip this winter to all but guarantee a rainy day.

I wonder if tourists would pay me on sunny days to walk behind them with a watering can held above their head, to better get the full rainforest experience.

(Almost) Out of Reach

My last day in Yellowstone had been wonderful, but I was hiking down from Mount Washburn on my last hike of the day and would soon leave for home. I stopped in my tracks when I heard a sharp noise to my left and was rather surprised to see a black bear eating seeds from pine cones in the tree beside the trail. The tree was on a steep hillside so even though the bear was at the top of the tree, we were almost at eye level. I made enough noise to be sure it knew I was there, but it didn’t pay me much heed as it tried to eat as many seeds as it could without moving from its perch in the tree. It would snap branches to bring pine cones closer if need be, or just stretch way over as it did here, all surprisingly at ease for a creature so large on branches so thin.

It Turns Out, I Can Be Wrong

This bald eagle pair has been courting at Ridgefield each spring but I always assumed they nested elsewhere. Apparently not. I had never seen a bald eagle nest before — it was massive. The two youngsters rested while their parents kept a watchful eye from a nearby tree. The young eagles looked pretty big, I suspect they’ll fledge soon, but I could be wrong. Again.

The First Carrot

The past few years at work have been productive but stressful and the last year in particular left me worn down and burned out. I hadn’t taken much vacation time but we either use-it-or-lose-it at the end of the year, so I was trying to decide if I should take most of the month of December off, or if I should take my normal fall hiking trip and then take a few weeks off at the end of the year. While the idea of a month away from work was very appealing, I decided to split up the vacation and take the hiking trip instead.

I realized that as a reaction to the stress I had settled into a funk and wasn’t getting things done that needed to be done. Needing either carrot or stick to get back on track, I settled on carrots with Yellowstone & the Tetons as Carrot Number One. Planning for the weeklong trip of hiking and photography forced me into action.

My contacts had long since run out and while I had been wearing my glasses instead, I prefer to photograph in contacts so I finally scheduled my overdue eye exam and got new contacts. And since it often rains during my fall hiking trips, I picked up some waterproof hiking shoes to replace my worn out pair, a small army of hiking socks to replace my threadbare contingent, and a couple pairs of waterproof gloves. All of which guaranteed a week of unusually hot and sunny weather during my week in Wyoming, but the wet weather gear has been put to good use ever since with the return of the rainy season to the Northwest.

Since I would be taking our much loved but aging Subaru Outback, I took her in for everything from routine maintenance to replacing a broken sensor and leaking head gasket and especially the broken cargo cover that left all my gear exposed to prying eyes. I also fired up iTunes to create some new CD mixes of recent music purchases to keep me entertained on the long drive.

Then there was an extra memory card and battery for my Canon 7D, which I’ve been meaning to order for a year or two, plus a portable hard drive for storage on the road. The hard drive was a much improved solution compared to the DVD’s I used to burn, the backups of the day’s pictures went much faster meaning I could get to sleep sooner. And while I didn’t need the new memory card for most of the trip, oh was I thankful to have it when I met this black bear eating pine cones on my way down from Mount Washburn. Yellowstone put on a show on my last day and I had taken a ton of pictures, and if not for the new card I would not have been able to photograph this wonderful creature during my last hours before heading for home. The extra card was also put to good use during my Christmas visits to Ridgefield.

There were other things too, like the car mount for the iPhone so that the little genius woman in the TomTom GPS app could guide me safely there and back again despite my notoriously poor sense of direction. Both the mount (from RAM Mounts) and the little woman worked wonderfully and the pair have kept me on the straight and narrow navigating Portland ever since.

All of which is a long way of saying that the hiking trip was not only great stress relief but also great motivation for getting things done large and small that have made life better ever since.

But I wasn’t quite finished with my carrots …

A Change of Plans

On my journey to the redwoods, I expected to work mostly with the widest angle of my lens, highlighting the immense size and height of these ancient trees. However, my plans changed instantly the moment I stepped on the trails. I was struck both by the myriad colors and textures of the trees as well as their tenacity in hanging onto life despite fire and storm damage. This is one of my favorite pictures from the trip and also one of my earliest, I stopped off for a quick hike around the Simpson-Reed Trail in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park before continuing on to my hotel in Crescent City.

The bark of this redwood was colored green by moss, while on the right of the picture where the bark has been stripped away, you can see the red pulp that gives the redwoods their name.

I’m Dreaming of a White 3 Days Before Christmas

Our winter wonderland continued into today although the snow finally tapered off this afternoon, the official snow total so far for the month of December is 14″. I took this picture shortly before shoveling the steps and sidewalk yet again and, for the first time, the shoveled parts were still clear by the end of the day. Tomorrow is supposed to be cold but cloudy so things shouldn’t get any worse, with Christmas Eve on Wednesday a possibility of rain or snow or both, so there’s a good chance we’ll have a white Christmas.

I had thoughts about walking down to the Rose Garden for pictures of the city in the snow but then I realized just how much snow and ice was weighing heavily on the roof of our back porch and storage shed, so I hauled out the ladder and got as much off as I could. Maybe I’ll head down tomorrow and ride the MAX into downtown.

All things considered I’ve really enjoyed the snow. I’ve been off work anyway so I didn’t have to worry about commuting in this mess, although it also means I haven’t been able to go hiking during my time off. We’ve not lost power or had any damage (knock on wood) and the blanket of snow is lovely. We’ve had many people skiing down the street or dragging their kids on sleds, and I had a chance to play a bit with the neighbors in the deep snow.

Ridgefield will just have to get by without me until the weekend when things warm up again. I’m sure there are many great photo opportunities of wildlife in the snow that I’m missing, and probably a yeti or two, but I don’t want to risk it until the roads are better.