Posts Tagged North Cascades National Park
June 14, 2010 – Cascade Pass
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State on June 14, 2010
Cascade Pass, North Cascades National Park
Monday, June 14, 2010
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=1291
Coming up with the opening for a Picture of the Day post is always the hardest part. Today, I decided to not try very hard. Tomorrow, I’m going to just start in the middle of a sentence. And you’re going to love it.
This was taken near Cascade Pass in North Cascades National Park. I hiked it last summer with a couple buddies, but for various reasons I completely screwed up my camera equipment strategy, so it’s on my list to go back to this summer, and do it right damnit. We’ll see if that actually ends up happening. There’s only a few weekends here in the PNW that are actually hikable (and the snow doesn’t even melt from the higher trails until mid-July), before you know it the summer’s over and done. Plus, with a young kid, weekends just tend to.. disappear. So, the odds are not in my favor. But the intention is totally there.
Anyway, this was about 200 or 300 yards before the summit of the pass proper. The views on the trail aren’t bad, obviously. You should check it out. But not the same day I do. I don’t want you to take my parking spot.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tamron 28-300mm lens. 1/200s, f/14.0, ISO 400. Focal length: 28mm.
Subscribe to the Picture of the Day via: Popularity: 21%
May 10, 2010 – Mt. Shuksan from Yellow Aster Butte
Posted by Dave in Fall Color, Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State on May 10, 2010
Mt. Shuksan from Yellow Aster Butte
Monday, May 10, 2010
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=1183
Mt. Shuksan, seen from Yellow Aster Butte. It’s worth noting that Yellow Aster Butte is not actually yellow. “But,” you might say, “the name doesn’t reference the Aster Butte that is Yellow, it is instead the Butte of Yellow Aster!”. And it’s true, there is some yellow stuff out there. But is that aster? I don’t know. I just don’t know.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel XT, Tamron 28-300mm VC lens. 1/60s, f/9.0, ISO 200. Focal length: 55mm.
Popularity: 29%
March 16, 2010 – Stehekin Valley
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State on March 16, 2010
Stehekin Valley, North Cascades National Park
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=1077
This is pretty similar to another picture I posted awhile back, but trust me, it’s not quite the same picture. It’s taken with different exposure settings, and it’s framed a little differently. This is how I roll. I can usually do a pretty good job of tossing out all the really crappy shots, but when it gets down to a few shots that are all technically decent enough, I have a really hard time picking the one that’s my favorite and sticking with it. It always comes down to liking one part of the first picture that’s not in the second, and one part of the second one that’s not in the first. And then it becomes like trying to pick which of your children is your favorite (and which one should be tossed out). Not an easy call. So I generally avoid the decision by just tossing them all online and moving on with my life. That’s what happened here.
This is the Stehekin Valley in North Cascades National Park. This was several miles past Cascade Pass on the (duh) Cascade Pass trail. We hiked in over the pass, then stayed for the night at a campground that was … well, just about where I was standing when I took this. This was the view at sunrise the next morning. If you go down that valley far enough, you’ll eventually reach Stehekin, which is a really small settlement at the far end of Lake Chelan. (Which is a super long (like 60 miles!) and narrow lake that cuts from the eastern slope of the Cascades into the heart of the range.) It’s only accessible by boat (or hiking), and I have never been there. It would have been a few more days walking from here to get there, and sadly my understanding is that the most interesting part of the hike was already behind me. We were just out for a quick out and back though, so this is as close to Stehekin as we got. Cascade Pass is a great hike though, even for just a day hike, up to the pass and back. Getting to the trailhead takes forever though, so leave early. (Or leave the night before and do some car camping.) Good times, good times.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tamron 28-300 mm lens. 1/500s, f/7.1, ISO 400. Focal length: 28mm.
Popularity: 29%
March 1, 2010 – Diablo Lake
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State on March 1, 2010
Diablo Lake, North Cascades National Park
Monday, March 1, 2010
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=1333
How sad, the Olympics are over. And it’s Monday. Double whammy. Sigh. Here’s a picture of a mountain to cheer you up. This is the view on Diablo Lake, in North Cascades National Park. It’s actually a man-made lake, with dams on both ends that generate a significant chunk of Seattle’s power. Technically, the lake itself is outside of the national park boundary, as is the road that goes “through the park”, but if your shoes touch dirt, you’re probably standing inside the park. (The park is split in two pieces, one north of the highway, one south, but it extends basically just up to the roadway on either side.)
This picture was actually taken on the Seattle City Light boat tour. They take you up the lake all the way to the dam that holds back Ross Lake, and back down to the dam that makes Diablo Lake a lake. There’s even a dinner option, although that’s not the one we did. It’s a great way to spend an afternoon, although it’s a bit of a drive to get there from Seattle (2-3 hours each way.) The unfortunate thing as a photographer is that the tour takes place right smack in the middle of the day, so you can basically forget about getting any interesting light for pictures. You get bright noonday sun, with the corresponding haze that brings. That’s okay though, because I’ve heard rumors that there are actually people out there that enjoy getting out into nature for reasons other than explicitly to take pictures of it. I don’t know who these people are, but I know they’re out there.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel XT, Tamron 28-300 mm VC lens. 1/200s, f/6.3, ISO 100. Focal length: 42mm.
Popularity: 40%
January 6, 2010 – Pacific Crest Trail
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State on January 6, 2010
Pacific Crest Trail
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=951
Hey everyone, we’re halfway through the week. Nice job! Today’s picture is from far northern Washington, only a handful of miles from the Canadian border. This is the Pacific Crest Trail, which goes from Canada all the way down to Mexico, traversing the crest all the way down through Washington, Oregon, and California. In Washington and Oregon, that means the Cascades. Down in California, I believe it goes through the Sierra, seems like a logical enough guess, right? I was just out for a day hike that day, but I ran into three distinct groups of folks who were hiking through. Two of them in particular had both left Canada on the same day 2 or 3 days previous, so they were obviously just getting started on quite an adventure. I had driven up to Harts Pass, which is just north of the North Cascades National Park boundary, and camped out there for the night. Then I hiked north toward Windy Pass (which wasn’t, and in fact was located at a DIP in the trail, so when I passed the pass I didn’t even realize it), and drove back to Seattle that night. Hart’s Pass is located a fair ways up a somewhat nasty forest road (meaning it gets a bit steep and rocky and narrow in spots, with some actually pretty incredible dropoffs on the side), but other than that it’s not too difficult to get to. (Except that it takes a LOOOONG time to get out there, it’s not convenient to *anything*.) You could do it in a standard front wheel drive car, although it’d be uncomfortable in spots.
This is another illustration of a common “rule” in photography: that the light is a lot better very early in the morning and very late in the afternoon. This wasn’t taken either of those times, and while the scenery is still nice, the light is uninspiring. The colors came out quite flat, which was disappointing although not really unexpected. I tried playing around with the white balance settings on my camera, and it helped a bit with the flatness, but it left a somewhat dirty-looking brown tinge, definitely not ideal. But it’s a gorgeous area and a nice hike so I left it in there anyway. I had been hoping to get there early enough the night before to catch that magic late afternoon time, but unfortunately I didn’t make it out as early as I had hoped, so I missed it by an hour or so. Sigh.
Also, this was right at the time when I was having huge problems with my image-stabilized 28-300 mm Tamron lens. It just plain wouldn’t focus. It *thought* it was focused, but it was way off. As in, not even close. Super annoying. Which meant all of the pictures I took that weekend were hand-focused. (Essentially meaning I used a super small aperture, focused near infinity, and hoped for the best.) It was shortly after this time that I sent in the lens for warranty “repair” (which didn’t really help), and then decided in sequence that 1) That lens was garbage, and I should go back to using the non-stabilized version, 2) that even the non-stabilized version resulted in me making compromises in image quality that I wasn’t comfortable with, and ultimately 3) that the idea of trying to find one lens that would cover my whole range such that I wouldn’t have to change lenses while hiking sadly wasn’t a workable goal, and 4) I would need to find a whole set of lenses to get it done. That resulted in 3 lenses: a Tokina 11-16 for wide angle shots, a Tamron 28-75 for most purposes (although that’s in the process of being replaced by a Tamron 17-50 – it’s in the mail right now), and my old Quantaray 70-300 for telephoto purposes. (Although that’s not my long-term solution. I don’t use it much, and even though it was really cheap it’s not a bad lens, so there’s not much of a push to replace it with something better yet. Although when I do it’ll probably be something like a 50-200.) As always, if you have any questions about what gear I use and why, please don’t be shy. I’m hardly an expert, but it’s taken me a long time (and an embarrassingly large chunk of my disposable income budget) to get to a set that I’m reasonably happy with, and I’m still not at a point where I’m totally happy. Sigh. Someday, someday.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tamron 28-300 mm VC lens. 1/160s, f/9.0, ISO 200. Focal length: 35mm.
Popularity: 12%
September 14, 2009 – Stehekin Valley
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State on September 14, 2009
Sunrise in the Stehekin Valley
Monday, September 14, 2009
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=1079
Happy Monday everyone. Today’s picture is from the trip I took (with my buddy Mark and his buddy John) out to Cascade Pass in North Cascades National Park earlier this summer. We hiked over the pass, then down into the Stehekin Valley on the other side. This was the view at sunrise from near the campground. Not a bad sight to wake up to. The Stehekin Valley heads down from the Cascade crest to, not surprisingly, Stehekin, which is a little town-if-you-can-call-it-that at the far end of Lake Chelan. I don’t want to go too far into the details here, but Lake Chelan is a super long lake (60 miles or something, but that could be way off) on the east side of the Cascades. Stehekin is at the far western corner, and is only accessible by foot, by boat, or by float plane. I have personally never been there, but it’s apparently about a 30 mile hike or something from there to the Cascade Pass trailhead. There are people who live there and everything, and I’m sure they’re friendly. My understanding is that there was a road that went there (via something near Cascade Pass) until some point in the mid-term past – 15 or 20 years ago probably. I’m totally making up these details now, but I suppose the road washed out or something and the decision was made to not repair it. Such things happen all the time here in the Pacific Northwest, so I feel safe enough assuming that’s the story.
On our little weekend trip, for some reason I had my ISO set on 400 for almost the entire time. I’m not really sure why. I do know, however, that I can’t blame it on a mistake of any sort. (As in, “holy crap! I just realized I had my ISO set on 400 this whole time! Dang!”) I definitely remember going over my camera settings multiple times and saying “ISO 400? Sure, that’s fine.” Why would I go ahead and say 400 was fine, even on a bright sunny day?? Now we’re talking Columbo-caliber mystery. Something in the water, perhaps. Regardless, based on that faulty decision, most of the pictures I have from the weekend are, as one would expect, somewhat noisy. Granted, it’s MUCH less of an issue than had I brought my older camera (the Canon EOS Rebel XT). The T1i definitely made that a lot less painful than it would have been otherwise. But, pair that with the fact that I was using a lens that I have since decided is total crap (my Tamron 28-300), and it follows logically that I’m fairly dissatisfied with my pictures from the trip. Sure, I got a good one here and there, but overall the quality is quite disappointing. Sigh. This picture in particular might have actually been at ISO 800 or perhaps higher. I don’t remember offhand. I could check, but I won’t. But it was a low-light situation, being sunrise and all, so that may have been enough to convince me to go even higher than the 400 that I decided was appropriate in general. The world will never know. Fortunately, the world will almost certainly also never care.
Now, on to other, more mundane topics. I noticed that *not a single one of you* voted for my blog on that sleazeball awards website that I pointed you all to on Friday! Actually, that’s not quite true. That sentence should really read: ”I noticed that *a single one of you* voted for my blog…”. But the idea is basically the same. So, please do so now, I’d appreciate it a whole bunch. Go here, sign up for an account, verify your email address, and vote Picture-of-the-day.com into award-winning-obscurity! http://bloggerschoiceawards.com/blogs/show/80957
Map: http://bit.ly/2EgnG6
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tamron 28-300 mm lens. 1/250s, f/7.1, ISO 400. Focal length: 28mm.
Popularity: 5%
August 28, 2009 – Cascade Pass
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State on August 28, 2009
Cascade Pass, North Cascades National Park
Friday, August 28, 2009
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=1006
Hey everyone, happy Friday! Today’s picture is from near Cascade Pass, in North Cascades National Park. The trail to Cascade Pass is one of the most popular in the state, mostly because the views are absolutely incredible and it’s not too hard to get there. (Up to the pass is only 1800 vertical feet.) I was backpacking there earlier this summer with Mark and his buddy John. Good times, although while we were on the trail we got nailed with a thunderstorm that dropped so much water that it washed out the road up to the trailhead (which is why the road is currently closed for repair), but this isn’t the time or the place for that story.
Normally I use Picasa (from Google) for all of my image editing. It’s free, it’s fast, and it’s very powerful. It’s not Photoshop, for sure, but in many ways that’s good for me. Picasa tends to be just powerful enough to let me do what needs to be done, without giving me so many options that I get lost in the woods and waste an hour on each picture. It’s great. But it’s got its shortcomings. For instance: using the Sharpen tool in Picasa really sucks. It makes your image look nasty. Well, only sometimes, but often enough that it’s annoying. They’ve fixed that in newer versions, but new version of the tool is as slow as … fill in your favorite colorful analogy here.
Enter Picnik. Picnik is an online flash-based photo editor. I had heard of them awhile ago, but today they came to Redfin to give a talk about site design, and that reminded me that I had been meaning to check them out. So, I did. I found this image lying around on my hard drive at work, so I uploaded it and did some work. Picnik is actually much more full-featured than Picasa, but all of the things I was afraid of when I heard “flash-based online photo editor” turned out to not be an issue at all. It’s extremely fast and responsive, and the sharpen tool works great! Sure, it’s still not Photoshop, but again, at least in my opinion, that’s still a good thing. There’s still a couple things I can do in Picasa that I can’t do in Picnik (well, okay, one thing: Graduated Tint. I *love* that tool), but at least for those cases where Picasa’s sharpen tool makes me cry, I now know that I can fall back to Picnik.
(Well, actually, that’s not quite true. It doesn’t work on my home machine. Which is 64-bit linux. But that’s not Picnik’s fault. **NOTHING** works on 64-bit linux the way it should.)
So, give it a shot! Or don’t. Either way, have a great weekend.
Map: http://bit.ly/3047Cn
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tamron 28-300 mm lens. 1/200s, f/16.0, ISO 400. Focal length: 28mm.
Popularity: 6%
July 15, 2009 – Diablo Lake
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State on July 15, 2009
Diablo Lake
Wednesday, July 15, 2009.
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=938
I was sitting on the couch last night wondering what the heck I would use for today’s picture, when I had a brilliant idea: let Julie pick it! So I did. Almost. She actually picked this one: http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=313 , another very similar picture of the same thing, but I actually liked this one better.. So, umm.. sorry honey.
You’re looking at Diablo Lake (sometimes known as Emerald Lake), which is really near, but not quite inside, North Cascades National Park. It’s actually a man-made lake, dammed by Seattle City Light, and it generates quite a bit of power for the city. This was taken from a big viewpoint along Highway 20, which is the road that takes you through the national park. (The road never actually enters the national park boundaries – the park is split in two pieces, one on the north side of the road and one on the south side.)
I stop here every time I drive through the park, and usually I take a picture from this exact spot. Depending on the time of day, it can be a completely different picture. (This was fairly early in the day – later on, you end up looking straight at the sun, which nicely silhouettes the big mountain and the big tree you’re looking at. Those two, together with that little tiny island to the left of the tree, make up the elements of the scene that I usually play with when I’m here.) The lake itself is actually really striking – it’s very very green, almost turquoise. You can’t tell in this picture though. Which actually makes it somewhat odd that I chose this one, because the green-ness of the lake is probably the most striking part of the view. It’s green because of all the glacial meltoff that drains in from the surrounding mountains, all the minerals and such, if you were wondering.
Here’s a couple interesting tidbits about this picture: Not only was it taken with a fairly old point and shoot digicam (a Canon S230 – 3.2 megapixels!), it was shot at a small image size (640 x 480!!). Back then, to save memory card space, I’d take most pictures at 640 x 480, except for the ones I thought I’d potentially be blowing up later – I’d take those at the largest size the camera would support. So I first took this picture, realized it was on small, then took a larger one. But, the larger one was framed somewhat differently (see it here: http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=222 ), and this morning I decided I liked this one better, so I went with it instead.
Map: http://bit.ly/4j05Z
Notes: Canon PowerShot S230 (Point and shoot). 1/125s, f/7.1.
Popularity: 10%