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.

As the sun goes down the colors our eyes perceive, as well as what a camera records, changes. These Sitka Mountain Ash (Sorbus sitchensis) berries were along the paved path at Picture Lake last Saturday. I photographed them about 7:00 pm, which was just a few minutes past sunset.  However, the sun had descended below the adjacent ridge long before, plunging my subject into deep shade.  With a digital camera it’s easy to compensate, but in this case I left my camera’s white balance set to daylight, letting the color go a little blue.

Is this an accurate representation of what my eyes saw? Probably not, but color memory is a fickle thing so it really doesn’t matter.  If the color of the berries was far around the color wheel from red then we’d know something was wrong. But since they’re red then we accept the color as more or less correct.

Mountain Ash is in the rose family. The fruits are reportedly edible, sour but becoming sweeter after a frost. I’ve never tried them. One website even talks of making Mountain Ash Wine. I suppose one can ferment almost any fruit so why not this one. The berries are certainly abundant this time of year, more so than the huckleberries for which so many people go foraging.

Colors on the opposite side of the color wheel make great contrasting combinations, like this Mountain Arnica (Arnica latifolia) blossom set against Broadleaf Lupine (Lupinus latifolius). This pair also shows a contrast between the radially symmetrical ray flowers of the Arnica and the pea flowers of the Lupine. Spiky vs. rounded. Sharp foreground vs. soft-focus background.

The Arnica and Lupine combination is prevalent mid-summer in the subalpine meadows of the North Cascades. Pretty much every meadow will have at least some patches of these two, in various combinations. This pair was photographed in the shade along the Skyline Divide Trail on August 15. On a clear day there are spectacular vistas of Mount Baker from Skyline. On this particular day the sky was hazy bright so it photographed nearly white, which isn’t very appealing. I shot the cover of Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest from Skyline a few years ago.

This photo was made with a 100mm macro lens set at f/4 to keep the background soft. I also shot variations at f/5.6 and f/8, but like this softer version best. I don’t often like to line everything up in the center of the frame, but here the subject is very symmetrical and the main focal point is below center so I think there’s a nice balance to the frame.
We’ve had so many cloudy days this August and into September that I may not get back to Skyline while there are still flowers blooming. Maybe I’ll get up there for fall foliage.

I used to joke with friends from the dry side of the mountains that it stops raining on July 7 and stays dry through most of September in Bellingham, the North Cascades, and the Olympics.  Well, not this year.  It’s been one of the coolest and wettest summers I can remember. The photo was made near the summit of Mount Townsend in the Buckhorn Wildnerness of Olympic National Forest in late July. It was pouring rain mid-day, and continued for most of the afternoon. And this is on the dry side of the Olympics.

Those of us who live on the wet west side of the Cascades learned quickly that if we stay home because it’s raining we’ll never get out and do anything. That doesn’t mean it’s more fun to go out in the rain, just that it’s a fact of life. The hike to Mount Townsend was a Botany Washington field trip to see the diverse alpine flora, including the rare and endemic Olympic Milkvetch (Astragalus cottonii). We found it before the rain started, but glistening with dew drops from the cloud that enveloped us. This was the first time I’d seen this species in bloom, although I’d seen its very showy inflated seedpods a few years ago on another Olympic hike.

While rainy days are challenging for photography in some ways, the soft light really opens up the shadows and makes it possible to capture every detail. Colors are rich and saturated and everything glistens with the raindrops. It helps when the rain comes down very softly and without any wind.

I use a cheap plastic camera cover when working in the rain.  It cinches down around the lens hood and has a small hole to go around the viewfinder. While it doesn’t keep the camera completely dry it helps a lot. I have to remember to check the lens frequently for water droplets, which create big soft spots.  That can be a nice effect if it’s deliberate, but more often I just miss seeing them through the viewfinder and find out later that I had a problem.

When we got off the trail I set all my gear out to dry overnight, spreading it around my host’s living room. Come morning there was still a lot of dampness, but the sun had returned. I headed back up to the mountains and started shooting again. Soon I thought everything looked fuzzy. I checked the lens and discovered that there was condensation inside. I switched lenses and set the damp one in the sun to dry out, which it did in fairly short order. I’d had that happen before and have never noticed any long-term problems.

I spent the last week, from July 7 to 14, photographing gardens in Bend, Oregon and wildflowers in the Western Cascades. It was a very productive 8 days with repeat visits to some gardens I’d photographed last August and several new gardens that I’d been told about since then. On the days I was shooting gardens I started work at 5:30 am to take advantage of the soft early morning light before the sun rose above the trees. I took a mid-day break for breakfast and scouting locations, and then worked from about 5:30 pm until nearly dark. After returning to the place I was staying I had to copy all the day’s work over to my computer and back it up, so I didn’t get to bed until after 11 pm most days. That made for very long work days.

On Thursday I didn’t have more gardens to scout so I drove west to Black Butte and hiked to the top to see what was blooming. The photo here was made from the summit, with Penstemon davidsonii (Davidson’s Penstemon) nestled among the volcanic rocks and Mount Jefferson in the background. The view from the top of the butte is spectacular, with the three Sisters, Mt. Washington, Mt. Jefferson, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Adams all visible on a clear day. I photographed a number of wildflowers on the 4-mile hike, including two species that were new to me. One is a regional endemic, Penstemon peckii, that was fairly common along the trail. The other is a member of the nightshade family that I spied while sitting down to key out a lupine. I’d never heard of Leucophysalis nana, Dwarf Chamaesaracha, but recognized the flower as being characteristic of nightshades and was able to key it out under the former name Chamaesaracha nana. I’ve seen and photographed a lot of flowers so it’s always exciting to find something new.

Over the weekend I participated in the Native Plant Society of Oregon annual meeting in Eugene. We visited the native plant nursery at Mount Pisgah Arboretum on Friday afternoon, botanized on the trail to Moon Point on Saturday, and on Patterson Mountain on Sunday. Monday I stopped for a full day of hiking and photography on Iron Mountain.

It’s going to take several days of office work to get everything captioned and uploaded so people can see the images. But that’s going to have to wait as I prepare to head east to Christina Lake, BC for another garden shoot on Friday.

A couple of days ago I went out to Lopez Island with a couple of friends to see what might be blooming on the open rocky bluffs along the shore at the south end of the island. There are a couple of public parcels managed by BLM, Iceberg Point and Point Colville.

We went to Point Colville, where there’s a trail through the forest from the road down to the bluffs. The woods are fairly mature second-growth Douglas-fir with a little Sitka Spruce. Woodland Tarweed and Twinflower were blooming profusely along the way. It’s not a long walk, and the area doesn’t get a lot of use. The photo is of a clump of Grindelia integrifolia, Puget Sound Gumweed perched on the edge of a bluff with Castle Island peeking through the morning fog in the background. We were blessed with this nice soft light filtered through thin clouds and coastal fog for most of the day.

The San Juan Islands are in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains so they are quite dry. It was warm and hadn’t rained for some time when we visited so the meadows were crispy with maturing grasses when they weren’t carpeted with the rather fragile Reindeer Lichens (mostly Cladonia portentosa ssp. pacifica). The most interesting plants were blooming in cracks in the rocks where their roots could reach down to cooler soil and little pockets of moisture. In addition to large quantities of Gumweed, I found a few nice clumps of Scotch Bluebells, a mass of Yerba Buena, and lots of Nootka Roses in their prime. The roses were growing mostly in deeper soil, often where they were a little bit protected by Douglas-firs.

We spent all day at Point Colville, never making it down to Iceberg. My friends were concentrating on the lichens while I sought out the flowering plants. I had hoped to find Opuntia fragilis which is on the island, but apparently not at Point Colville. My Pacific Northwest Wildflowers website has two galleries for the day — one for the wildflowers and another for the lichens. Browse the photos for July 2, 2008 to see them.

One of the plants on my list to find and photograph has been Opuntia fragilis, fragile prickly pear cactus, which grows on both sides of the Cascades in Washington and other places in the Northwest. I’d seen it, or at least thought I had, in a couple of places but never found it in bloom until this month.

I say I thought I’d seen fragile prickly pear because that’s how a bunch of it in Yakima Canyon keyed out in Flora of the Pacific Northwest. The photograph above is from the Umtanum Recreation Site about halfway between Ellensburg and Yakima where the cactus grows next to the campground. However, I’ve since learned that these plants are actually Opuntia columbiana, grizzleybear prickly pear. The pads are flatter than O. fragilis and some authors say it’s a hybrid species. Others write it as Opuntia x columbiana, indicating that it’s a proposed species. Still others call it O. erinacea var. columbiana. No wonder I was confused. I found a web Primer on Washington Native Cacti that helps to sort them out. See more photos of the Yakima Canyon cactus on my Kittitas County June 19 page on the Pacific Northwest Wildflowers website.

Since my photos from Yakima Canyon weren’t what I thought they were, I headed out again yesterday afternoon in search of the real thing. I went to Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve near Coupeville on Whidbey Island armed with GPS coordinates interpolated from WTU Herbarium botanical foray records from 2004. The species is somewhat rare, classified in Washington as a species of concern, so exact locations aren’t published. I had looked for O. fragilis at Ebey last month and didn’t find it, but this time I located it where I’d seen it several years ago just above the logs at the back of the beach. The specimen didn’t look very healthy and wasn’t in bloom. Since the steep sandy slope is somewhat eroding, although held in place by grasses and other plants, I thought there must be more plants straight up the hill.

I left my pack and tripod on the beach and headed up, keeping a sharp lookout for cactus, especially for the showy yellow flowers. This photo is from the first clump I found, about 50 feet above the beach. Notice how fat and rounded the pads are. O. fragilis doesn’t form very large clumps and they aren’t very tall, so the browning grasses on the hillside kept the cactus mounds rather well hidden. As I looked up the hill I spotted several more cacti in bloom. At that point I returned to the beach for my camera pack and tripod and went to work.

When I find a plant of interest I try to photograph it from several angles, showing foliage (or pads in the case of cacti), flowers, details, and a habitat view. I used three different lenses on this plant — a 90 tilt-shift, 24-105 for wide views, and a 100 macro. An overcast sky made nice soft light, but the habitat view wasn’t as interesting as if the sky were clear and the water reflecting blue. See the whole set on my Ebey’s Landing page.

I also found other plants I associate more with the dry east side of the mountains, including tapertip onion (Allium acunimatum) and harvest brodiaea (Brodiaea coronaria). It seems counterintuitive to have a desert just above the beach, but Ebey’s Landing is in the Olympic rain shadow. Weather data for Coupeville shows about 20 inches of rainfall annually and the soils on the bluff at Ebey are sandy and well-drained.