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Winter Solstice

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Once in a while we get a “real” winter in Bellingham.  This is one of those years. We’ve had several days with lows below 20°F and snow that’s stayed around.

Bridge at Whatcom Falls, winter

Today I drove out to Whatcom Falls Park to photograph the falls and the stone bridge in the snow. We’d had another 4-6 inches of snow overnight and the temperature was still in the 20s so the conditions were perfect. I spent about an hour around the falls shooting from as many vantage points as I could safely get to. One of my favorites is to look downstream at the bridge from the top of the falls, which is the view here.

I also photographed the falls from on the bridge, and from streamside downstream from the bridge. I have a nice photo from that vantage point from the snow of Christmas 1996 which was published on a calendar for Towner Press a few years ago. I have a large print of that one available for sale if anyone is interested.

Lighted shrub at VanDusen
After warming up with a bowl of soup at home, I headed north to VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver for their festival of lights. The roads were a bit messy, but I made it without difficulty, only to find a sign on the entrance saying the lights had been cancelled for tonight because of the weather.  I got there about 3:45 and the garden closed at 4:00 pm, so I had only a short time in the garden. They had a few of the lights turned on, so I got a handful of photos before I had to leave.

It was snowing the whole time I was in Vancouver, so the streets and roads were in worse shape on the way home, particularly on the Canadian side of the border. Hopefully I can get back up to VanDusen for the lights while there’s still snow on the ground as the display there is very nice and well worth the trip.

A Walk to Whatcom Falls

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Weathered Siding

Winter arrived in Bellingham yesterday, with blowing snow last night and temperatures dropping from our typical mid-30s and low-40s down to the teens. Then the sun came out, so I decided it was time for a walk along the Railroad Trail to Whatcom Falls Park.  The round trip distance is something like 8 miles, which makes for a nice Sunday afternoon stroll. It was definitely too icy for me to want to take a bike ride.

I put my new iPhone in my pocket, set to play music through Pandora, and headed out. Sidewalks and trails were icy in spots, bare in some, and just packed snow the rest of the way. The wind was still blowing, but I was bundled up against it. I started out a bit cold, but by the time I got to Barkley I was toasty warm and took my gloves off.  I carried my Canon S70 camera in my pocket in case I came across anything interesting.

I don’t know the history of the building in the photo above, but I’ve liked looking at it every time I walk or bicycle the trail just east of the I-5 crossing. With the low afternoon sun accenting the weathered wood and peeling paint I just couldn’t resist.

Whatcom Falls

There were lots of people out on the trail — walkers, joggers, a few on bicycles, and a couple of parents pulling little kids on sleds. Dogs of every size accompanied their humans, too.

When I got to Whatcom Falls Park there were several people on the stone bridge enjoying the rushing water of the falls.  A couple of other people were also taking pictures.  I used the bridge as a tripod, resting my camera on the railing so I could use a slow shutter speed and blur the water. There’s always a lot more water flowing over the falls in the winter than in the summer, so they look fuller and more exciting.

This time of year I don’t do a lot of photography, so it was good to get out and exercise my shutter finger as well as my legs.  I don’t think it would atrophy from disuse, but there’s no reason to take that chance.  Periodically I think I should discipline myself to make at least one photo each and every day. I’m pretty focused, but I haven’t made the daily photo a habit. Perhaps that should be my New Year’s resolution.

Darn Near Dark at 3 pm

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Well, it’s definitely the dark and rainy season here in the northwest.  It’s not quite 3 pm on this wet afternoon and it’s nearly dark.  Official sunset isn’t for another hour or so, but you couldn’t tell that from looking outside.  Our solar panels aren’t getting enough light to produce anything.  The whole day, we’ve produced a whopping 630 watts of power.  In comparison, on a sunny afternoon we’ll produce that much in about 7 minutes.  It would be a good day to curl up by the fireplace with a good book, if only we had a fireplace. I’ll read this guide by SmartlyHeated, that my brother keeps asking about, maybe I’ll get inspired.

But even in the rain the house finches have been feeding on sunflower seeds from the feeder in the back yard.  And the raindrops glisten on the bare branches of the kousa dogwood. With rhododendrons, daphne, and ferns, the view out our kitchen window always shows something green.

It will be time to put up some Christmas lights on the Korean fir and dogwood soon.

In Defense of Non-conventional Rock Gardens

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A guest entry from Panayoti Kelaidis, originally posted on the Alpine-L discussion list. Visit Panayoti’s Botanic Gardens Blog from the Denver Botanic Gardens.

I possess a classic sort of rock garden, chockablock full of androsaces, primulas, saxifrages, gentians galore and all the other card carrying members of the Bona Fide Alpine Plant club. In fact, I suspect I grow as many of these as just about anyone else. I love them of course. I would not want to be without them. You can find most plants in this garden represented in many of the several hundred rock garden books I have accumulated in the course of my lifetime: it’s pretty conventional really. I still like it.

And yet I have another garden where nary a saxifrage grows, let alone a primula, much less an androsace. Here you will find over 100 kinds of miniature cacti, South African succulents, penstemons, eriogonums, ten species of Talinum, oncocyclus iris, juno iris galore, crocuses, strange cushion plants like Satureja spinescens. These are grown in crevices and among rocks just as they might in nature. Probably half the plants in this garden have never appeared in a single rock garden tome. In my heart of hearts, I love both gardens very much, and would be hard put to choose between them: the dryland rock garden has one stellar quality, however. It is utterly novel and fresh in every way.

Mexican Hat in Blue Gramma Meadow

But what would we make of the blue gramma meadow filled with fritillaria, calochortus and allium? or the twin berms, one filled with tiny carpeting treasures from Western America (the usual steppe rabble) and the other from the Eastern hemisphere: veronicas, acantholimons, tulips and a jillion tiny mints and composites. And hardly a single rock in any of these gardens, which comprise many thousands of square feet? They would hardly qualify as a rock garden technically. They sure as heck ain’t perennial borders.
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Fallen Leaves

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Fallen Cottonwood Leaves

The rainy season has begun and after a glorious and drier than normal October, it’s wet out in the woods. These Black Cottonwood leaves were covering a portion of the trail around Canyon Lake this morning. The Vine Maples lost their leaves nearly a month ago, followed by the Bigleaf Maples. The Red Alders, which aren’t colorful at all, still have a few leaves.

Of course, all the conifers and evergreen ferns are still green. That’s one of the big differences between winter in the northwest and in places that have an almost exclusively deciduous forest. I’ve come to like what we have here and don’t really want to go back to having only shades of brown in the winter forest.

Today’s hike was an easy stroll around Canyon Lake.  It’s about 2 miles and nearly level. There were still a few lingering Tiarella flowers. I saw at least one Large-leaved Geum with its bright yellow flower, and there were several of the non-native Herb Robert flowers around as well. Mostly what we looked at along the trail were the myriad of mosses on rotting logs and tree trunks and the large number of lichens. There were liverworts, too, but they look a lot like mosses or lichens if you don’t know any better.

I only carried my little Canon S70 pocket camera today.  I’d hauled my big camera along the same trail about a month ago, creating a number of nice images that I  haven’t gotten captioned yet.  It’s nice to travel light for a change.

Autumn Larch

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Larch in Autumn GardenOur native Larch is a tree I don’t see in gardens very often. All summer it’s a soft green, but in the autumn it turns brilliant gold for a short period before dropping its needles for the winter.

This larch is in Cynthia Krieble’s Ellensburg, Washington garden. It’s right out front where everyone passing by on the sidewalk or street can see it in a border of mixed conifers, drought-tolerant perennials, and grasses. Other plants visible in the photo include red-twig dogwood, Russian sage, and a juniper. Cynthia is an artist who gardens like she paints, mixing colors and textures in a varied palette. You can see some of her work at Linda Hodges Gallery.

I made the photo this afternoon when the sun peeked out from the thin, high clouds that moved in today. At this time of year the sun never gets very high in the sky, so even mid-afternoon light is low and dramatic. Backlighting enhances the texture and color in the needles. With the sun at my back the larch, while still attractive, was not nearly as exciting.

This was my fourth visit to Cynthia’s garden. Photos from the others are at Inland Northwest Gardening.

Raven Rose

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‘Raven’ RoseLast month I was down in Portland for the annual Garden Writers Association symposium. I took time on the morning afterward to spend a few hours exploring and photographing in the International Rose Test Garden. There are a huge number of roses in the garden, many of them looking very nice in late September. But one stood out to me that day — a shrub rose called ‘Raven’.

What struck me was the pattern of the petals. Neither too full nor a single, I liked the way the individual petals curved around and formed nice patterns in each blossom. The bushes were covered with lots of these very dark red velvety flowers.

I’ve never seen ‘Raven’ in the garden center, but it’s one I’d definitely seek out if I decide there’s room in our garden for a new rose.

Now that we’re almost to the end of October, the roses are about finished. But it’s nice to think back and remember some of the blooms from earlier in the season.

Autumn Color

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Bigleaf Maples among Conifers

The Pacific Northwest isn’t known for fall color the way New England is, but we still get our share of brilliant yellows and oranges. The color here is from Bigleaf Maples (Acer macrophyllum) growing on a steep hillside above the Baker River. I shot from across the river with a 70-200mm lens and worked over the image in Lightroom to improve the contrast and saturation.

It’s getting toward the end of the foliage season, and most of the maples around Baker Lake and along the Baker River trail today had already lost most of their leaves. The Vine Maples were nearlybare, with just a few lingering leaves showing pale color. I’d hoped there would be more interesting foliage when I set out for a hike today, but it was mostly disappointing photographically.

All was not lost, as it was a very pleasant day for a walk in the woods. The clouds lifted mid-day and the sunshine highlighted the moss-covered tree trunks. I found a couple of species of coral fungi and maybe identified one of them in my copy of David Arora’s Mushroom Demystified. There were some other mushrooms along the way, but mostly past their prime or so small as to not be particularly interesting.

At the end of the day I drove up to Baker Hot Springs to see if it had been dug out after being filled in by a winter storm a few years ago.  The pool was back to similar size to what I remembered and I sat and soaked a while before heading home.

Mt. Baker from Bellingham Bay

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Mt. Baker from Bellingham Bay

This afternoon was a glorious blue-sky sunny autumn day with temperatures in the low 50s. Perfect for a bike ride around Lummi Peninsula. I chose to ride counter-clockwise for the first time in many visits to this regular loop, so I came back along Lummi Shore Road. The view from the road is across Bellingham Bay to Mount Baker. I was pedaling briskly, but able to enjoy the spectaular view of the mountain at the same time. The water was nearly totally calm, unusual for the bay, and the sky was a cloudless rich blue.

When I got home I decided I needed to return with my camera for the late afternoon light. I parked at one of the higher points along the road so I could look down on the water as well as across the bay to Bellingham and the mountain. Unfortunately, by 5:45 pm the sky had some high cirrus clouds and light haze over the mountain. The view just wasn’t as dramatic as I had envisioned. Always the optimist, I set up and made a series of exposures as the sun went down. I shot with my 70-200mm lens, coupled with a 2x teleconverter for many frames (including the one here).

I waited a while after the sun left the mountain to see if the sky would get interesting in that time between the sun dropping below the horizon and darkness. The clouds over Lummi Island were OK, but not spectacular. Over Baker there was nothing interesting going on so I headed home.

The frame here has benefitted from some work in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop to enhance the color of the sky and improve the contrast of the forested hills and the city buildings. It’s closer to what I envisioned than the raw camera capture.

And the bike ride?  I set a new personal speed record for the year, averaging 18.9 mph over about 32.5 miles. Much of the time I was riding 21-22 mph on the flatter sections of road. There are no big hills, just a few gentle upgrades on the route.

Mt. Baker

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Self Portrait below Mt. BakerMid-October is getting toward the end of the good weather in the North Cascades. I took advantage of a nice day today to head up toward Mt. Baker to photograph the mountain and the rugged crevasses and seracs on the lower portion of the Coleman glacier. I made this self-portrait at the high point of my hike, a bit over 5900 feet elevation. The crevasse I’m stradling wasn’t very deep so I felt comfortable going out on the glacier by myself without an ice axe. However, I didn’t go any farther than where I’m standing.

The weather wasn’t as good as I’d hoped for. The blue sky in the photo was only in evidence for a short time about 3 pm, but it couldn’t have been timed any better. Most of the time the sky was a hazy white with thin, high clouds signaling an approaching front which will probably bring rain on Monday.

The Coleman glacier, which flows north off Mt. Baker and terminates into Glacier Creek, is heavily crevassed and the lower portion has substantial seracs. A climbing class of more than a dozen students was busy practicing their ice climbing on the glacier below me. I tried that once, in about the same place, and decided ice climbing isn’t for me. Maybe I gave up too easily and I should try again.

Several creeks cross the Heliotrope Ridge trail as it winds its way up toward the glacier. The higher elevation crossings were challenging because of ice on the rocks. In mid-summer the challenge is huge water flows from melting snow, but that wasn’t the issue today. In one case I threw a bunch of small stones at the ice to break it off the rocks so I could have a firm place to stand mid-stream. I really didn’t want to get wet or injured.

All told, I hiked about 6 miles with 2300 feet of elevation gain and loss today. If I hadn’t gone to the mountains I could have gone kayaking, bicycling, or worked in the garden.