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.

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.