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This gallery contains 7 photos.
The day blossomed full of possibilities. We were late to the party—nearly two feet of snow had blanketed the ski …
10 Wednesday Apr 2024
Posted Travel & Adventure
inTags
This gallery contains 7 photos.
The day blossomed full of possibilities. We were late to the party—nearly two feet of snow had blanketed the ski …
01 Wednesday Nov 2023
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After my first hike this year, the next two days were wet. Good days to stay inside watching leaves blow and deer graze while catching up on my reading. Later in the week I indulged into two more lovely hikes, expanding my range considerably.
It was a gorgeous, crisp morning for an eight-mile+ walk in the woods. Hiking in snow is like reading a mystery. Footprints narrate the lives of creatures large and small that pass through the night.
The higher in elevation I went, the more patches of snow dotted the trees.
And the higher I went, the longer the sun had been working on those patches of snow which let loose in the form of little ice balls that clunked me on the head. The sky is falling! 😂 Throughout portions of this forest a familiar, but unknown to me smell lodged in pockets along the trail. Best way I can describe it is a smelly feet smell. I used to think it was the scent of nearby wildlife. Then someone told me it was the scent of a particular shrub, but I saw none of those shrubs in this area. It’s a forest mystery to me.
The next day, I hiked a bit further up a completely different drainage trail with very little elevation gain. It was thrilling to me to realize that before I turned back to the car, I was just six miles from Loon Lake, a very popular hike/bike ride out of McCall.
Frost encrusted plant just steps away from a hardy strawberry still toughing it out.
Evidence of hard lives lived. I love stumbling on finds like this and contemplating who inhabited the place. How long did they stay? Did they leave richer or poorer, in health or in sickness?
Beside beautiful Ruby Meadows, the unmistakable and brutal evidence of what the ol’ geezers from the sunken cabin were after. The scars placer mining wreaks on the earth last way longer than the miners who tore the land apart in search of glitter and gold.
Posted by rangewriter | Filed under Photography, Travel & Adventure
28 Saturday Oct 2023
Posted Photography, Travel & Adventure
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I began this year’s traditional fall week in McCall, Idaho with a short, but taxing hike on a trail I knew had recently been cleared by Idaho Trails Association. My hiking book ranked it as strenuous. But how strenuous could a 4.4-mile hike be?
Well, for this out-of-shape, septuagenarian with yoyoing blood pressure concerns, those two miles of old-school-straight-uphill felt VERY strenuous.
The struggle was worth the effort. The view expanded the higher I went.
This was near the top, where the trail would merge with another trail that I didn’t have the time, energy, or resources to explore. I allowed myself a little sit down to enjoy the view, eat a snack and drink water that I had not imbibed enough of on the way up.
I almost made up for my slow ascent on the way down. My strong knees allow me to take advantage of downward momentum.
I was mesmerized by the brilliant fall colors. I love this time of year.
25 Wednesday Oct 2023
Posted Photography, Travel & Adventure
inTags
art, Frye Art Museum, Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Seattle, Van Gogh Immersive, Washington
In Seattle I had a lovely dinner with family friends. We were so excited to see each other that we plumb forgot to take photos. The next morning I treated my host to the Van Gogh Immersive in downtown Seattle. That was amazing! Perhaps most amazing is that when I parked my car in what I was told was a sketchy downtown neighborhood, I foolishly left the ignition on. (It’s a hybrid and very silent, and I was too distracted to notice the idiot buzzers warning me that I am an idiot.) We’d been enjoying the Van Gogh for about 15 minutes when a staff member walked up and asked if I’d parked a grey RAV4 outside. Indeed. “Someone reported the engine running,” she smiled kindly. I hightailed it out to the parking lot, where now the rain was falling out of the sky in sheets, to find—yes! my car—headlights on, automatic windshield wipers thwacking away and not a soul in sight! Obviously, Occidental Street is not such a bad area of Seattle! The multimedia exhibit was fabulous.
The next day I visited the Frye Gallery, which a friend had recommended. Unfortunately, the gallery was in between installations, yet there was still plenty to peruse and ponder with the installation of ESTAR(SER), the Third Meaning. (Esthetical Society for Transcendental & Applied Realization; Society for Esthetic Realizers)
“An ancient tale tells of an artist who once painted a child carrying a bunch of grapes. The image was so lifelike that birds flocked around the canvas to peck at its fruit—but even then, the painter wasn’t satisfied. If the child had been more realistic, he reasoned, the birds would have been too frightened to approach. Determined to fix this defect, he reworked the painting and set it outside, then watched as the birds drew near: the first glimpsed the child and fled; the second tried to eat the illusory grapes. But the Third Bird simply landed in front of the painting and looked at it, in near perfect stillness, for a very long time.
Embarking from this story of appetite and fascination, the collective of artists-researchers know as ESTAR(SER) has assembled an eclectic range of works from the Frye Art Museum’s collection, from beloved paintings to rarely shown treasures. Installed in a dreamscape of history, myth, and imagination, The Third, Meaning poses the “Birdish” problem: How exactly should we pay attention to an artwork? Do we draw near? Turn away? Keep looking?“
I looked quite deeply before heading south toward Rainier National Park. Of course, the weather wrapped the mountains in mystery.
A short, damp hike through the woods stimulated more deep looking.
Next was Morton, Washington. The name hearkens not from salt, but from President Harrison’s VP, Levi Morton. It’s another of those cute little communities reimagining itself its former rough logging identity to it’s current impersonation of an art enclave.
The weather was clear enough by now that I took advantage of the opportunity to visit Mt. St. Helens, which erupted one fine morning when I was a youngster and traveling blithely through Portland on my way home from Seaside, Oregon. I had also visited the site ten years later, but the mountain and environs were mostly hiding in fog that day.
I can’t resist sharing a few last parting shots of hikes through the astounding PNW forests.
16 Monday Oct 2023
Posted Photography, Travel & Adventure
inI live in the farthest inland region of the Pacific Northwest (PNW) of America. This means that I see a lot more sun and (normally) experience far greater heat than those who inhabit the coastal edges of the region. As a matter of fact, Boise sits at the convergence of high desert sagebrush steppe and high mountain ecosystems. As a near-desert inhabitant, the greener, more coastal regions fascinate me—but not enough for me to abandon the blue sky and sun that I love.
Visiting PNW friends provides the bonus of magnificent and varied landscapes. Initially I drove west through typical southern Idaho and Oregon dryscape. At Umatilla I crossed the Columbia River which divides Southern Washington from Northern Oregon and continued west alongside the river, still surrounded by dry sagebrush steppe and wheatgrasses. I was bound for Maryhill which I hadn’t visited for decades.
Maryhill is regionally famous for it’s full-scale replica of Stonehenge that was built on a bluff above the Columbia River by philanthropist Samuel Hill as a monument to local soldiers killed in World War I. A Quaker, Hill had hoped to establish a community in this area, but that never quite came to fruition. His Stonehenge is a sight to behold, though. Legend has it that Hill visited England during WWI, and upon seeing Stonehenge, was told it had been used for human sacrifices to pagan gods—a theory which is no longer supported. His remark, “After all our civilization, the flower of humanity still is being sacrificed to the god of war on fields of battle,” which was the inspiration for his Stonehenge project in Washington State. Unfortunately, humanity is yet sacrificed to the god of war.
It was getting late in the day so I skipped the Maryhill Museum of Art, having visited it once many years ago. It is an interesting place with an eclectic assortment of works by Rodin, Columbia Plateau Indian Art, early American artists and religious icons from Romania.
Yakima was next. I had a campsite reserved at Yakima River Campground. After a lovely visit with a dear friend of my mother’s, I settled in at my campsite and headed for a little hike up the Vista Trail, which branches off Umtanum Creek. A stunning supermoon served as after dinner dessert.
Then it was north to Seattle. I’ll save that for Part 2.