Some of you know that I occasionally shoot infrared and I brought my IR camera along to the Northwest. You can convert a digital sensor for a reasonable cost and choose from different parts of the IR range. I got the default. Bright green plants go almost white and blue skies get very dark. This is a view across Lake Quinault, the place we stayed when we visited the Olympics.
Anyone who looks at my work knows about the giant stainless steel arch on the St. Louis riverfront. There are plenty of other interesting arches, and I'm not talking McDonald's. This view is along a path in the upper Hoh valley rain forest. I do not know if the tree grew and collapsed this way naturally or whether the park rangers did something to it in laying out the trail.
Still on Ruby Beach. This is why putting non-functional rock cairns on drift logs does no harm here. It's just an open expanse of rough beach where you can see on and on. If you walk up into the forest, though, you're on your own.
Strange signs on Ruby Beach. These little piles are usually referred to as rock cairns. They are designed to mark trails in our national parks, often with very specific meanings. However, I've seen them in other places I love and love to photograph, particularly the side canyons in Death Valley, where they are obviously just for fun.
If you do a little Googling on the subject, the outdoorsy sites tell you not to do this. The purpose is to prevent people from getting lost. But there is no getting lost straight across the beach. These cairns on a huge drift log look to me like a system of antennas. Whom they communicate with is left to your imagination.
Home again but it will take me awhile to collect local material and there is still lots from the trip. There are only a few places in the world where you can find a cool rain forest. The western side of the Olympic mountains is one of them. Several rivers begin in the high glaciers and flow to the Pacific, with heavy rain going in the other direction. This is a trail called the Hall of Mosses in the upper Hoh River valley. It varies a lot by season but the area receives up to 12 feet / 3 2/3 meters of rain a year.
It's late Thursday night here in Seattle and we have to get up early on Friday for our flight home. I'll edit on the plane but for now another Pacific beach picture. Whoever sits in these chairs might be waiting for the apocalypse to arise out of the mist on the ocean horizon.
Ruby Beach on Washington's Olympic Peninsula is one of my favorite places in the world to photograph. We've been here a couple of other times over the years but every visit is different. We got there yesterday not long before sunset and the light was stunning. I've got more of these I'll publish somewhere.
We took a roundabout route from Seattle to the place we are staying in the Olympic National Park, Lake Quinault Lodge. Our plan took us to the ocean for some distance before cutting back inland to the rain forest. The Pacific coast up here is wild and desolate, with a few pullouts from the coastal road. This beach was wide and flat, damp and packed enough you could drive well out in a 4WD vehicle. The sky was clear above but a constant mist rolled in. That's the kind of optics I like in this part of the country.
The roots of an upturned tree seen on the lower slopes of Mt. Rainier. As the trunk decays it becomes the source and nourishment of lichens, moss, fungi, bacteria and, in time, young sapling trees. At that stage it is known as a nurse log.
Mrs. S.T. and I are enjoying a few days on the western side of Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, one of the few temperate rainforests in the world. It's wet and there's a jungle out there. No gorillas in this jungle but there are elk. I got some pix of a couple of baby elk feeding in the forest yesterday. Some of them will go on Flickr if I ever get this truckload of pix edited. Remember John Cleese's line when playing Mr. Gumby in Monte Python, "I would put a tax on holiday snaps"? It would bankrupt me. 
