Distance / Elevation

Last week's overnight took us to Bear Lake in the Indian Heaven Wilderness. We left Portland at around 1pm and hit the trailhead at 3:30, stopping at Wapiki Lake as a potential campsite but then deciding that we hadn't earned our dinners yet. We pressed on over the ridge to discover a land of turquoise waters, open meadows, and the worst mosquitoes we've seen this year by a long shot! They were so bad that it was impossible to stop for more than about a minute -- which kept us from taking too many breaks. After the sun went down, the mosquitoes seemed to let up and we got a great view of the Neowise comet (as well as the whole Milky Way) over the lake. But there were about sixty of the little bloodsuckers fastened to our tent when we woke up in the morning. Breaking down camp was a real fire drill.

That being said, this would be a really nice place to visit again in the Fall.

This was my second roll of Kodak UltraMax 400. It's humbling how difficult it is to get a shot that I like. But it’s also been fun to learn something new and totally different.

Mt Mitchell was an easy, isolated hike (we only saw one other person, on a weekend) without any mosquitoes and plenty of wildflowers. There were a couple of views of Mt Saint Helens on the way up. Most of the trail was under heavy tree cover but the summit offered a 360 degree viewpoint.

I shot this set of photos on film — I'm fairly certain that it was my first roll of color film ever. Instead of having space for over a thousand exposures on my memory card, I had 24 exposures to work with (three were test shots). I had to ask myself every time I raised my camera to my eye, "is this shot really worth a dollar?". I got it wrong more than I got it right. But when it was right, it looked amazing.