I was standing in the middle of the street, intently looking through the viewfinder at a neon sign on the roof of the Pike Place Market, when I heard a shout from inside the market and a fishmonger pointing at me:

“Look out!”

My first thought was: “hey, you talkin’ to me?”

Then my brain kicked in and I turned around to face the threat–a dark sedan sliding somewhat sideways down the hill directly toward me. Adrenalin pumping, I backed off the street as the car managed to slide into the turn successfully at the bottom of the hill. Death averted.

Seattle and snow blend about as well as slugs and salt. It just isn’t something that people here deal with very often, so Seattlites don’t have the infrastructure or the driving ability to deal with these snowstorms that happen every few years.

Seattle is so full of kindly liberals that people knit sweaters for the city’s trees (actually, this is part of Suzanne Tidwell’s wonderful exhibit of knitted trees in Occidental Park)

This storm brought perhaps 5″ of snow to downtown Seattle. If you come from a part of the country that experiences macho snowfalls (as I did, coming from Syracuse two decades ago), 5″ will seem puny–hardly worth dragging out the snowblower for. But Seattle has hills … really steep hills right downtown that cause your calves to scream with rage as you hike upslope. And there are few snowplows. During a big storm in the 1990s that took many days to clean up, I remember the mayor saying pitifully that “we only have seven snowplows!”

Cross-country skier commuting to work on 1st Avenue

There is also a Seattle aversion to salting the roads. In the last big snowstorm, several years ago, the city government expressed a horror about the environmental impact of salt and the salty runoff trickling down into Puget Sound. My first reaction was incredulity, as in: “Puget Sound is already … SALTWATER!” Fortunately, the old salts prevailed and the city now uses salt, though not really enough.

Snow affects Seattle politics. In December 2008, then Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels was the guy who refused to use salt on the roads, so they were icy from December 13-27, causing traffic problems and accidents for the whole two weeks. I remember barely making it to the airport that year for our Christmas flight, after getting ensnared in a traffic jam on back roads that were so completely coated with ice that they looked like skating rinks.

Cyclamens and ferns enduring the snowy day in Waterfall Garden Park

Seattle’s mayor had a second PR problem in the snows that year. I recall a media report that the city’s road maintenance department took it upon themselves to plow a road directly from the mayor’s home to city hall, rather than plowing out major streets first. Of course, citizens were outraged, even after the mayor exclaimed that he had nothing to do with that decision.  Largely as a result of the snowstorm problems, the mayor didn’t even make it through the primary elections the next year.

Hammering Man, a sculpture by Jonathan Borofsky to celebrate workers, works 24/7 through the storm

On the morning of the heavy snowfall this year, Karen and I trudged from our Bremerton apartment to the ferry bound for Seattle, wearing waterproof L.L. Bean boots, the parkas we wore on an Antarctic trip a decade ago, heavy mittens, and woolen hats from Kathmandu. Karen was heading to her job in the marble corridors of a law office, and I was going to spend the day documenting the Seattle snowfall. It was a cold and wet day, with constant light snowfall, but I was able to get the selection of photographs you see here.

Seattle was virtually deserted that morning, save for a few hardy office workers who were able to take transit of some sort, since ferries, light rail, heavy rail, and some buses were operational. The buses wore chains, as did most delivery vehicles. That night, when returning home, Karen had trouble descending the steep hills on foot, as the colder evening temperatures turned slush to ice. The problem?  Not enough salt to keep the sidewalks safe. So she telecommuted the next day.

The Smith Tower, once the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi, rises above one of the old brick buildings of Pioneer Square. The brick building has a faded ad for the Washington State Ferries that says “Have Lunch Over Seas,” which is a playful thing to do when crossing Puget Sound.

The homeless were still on the streets during the storm; after all, where else would they be? I asked one homeless man if I could take his picture; he was wearing a gray snowflake-covered blanket draped over his head, and he was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke that hung in the air in front of his dark face. Alas, he said “No, I don’t think so.” I offered him money, and he said he didn’t need any. So, that one great picture will just have to stay forever etched in my mind.

Space needle with satellite dishes pointed toward space

Alaskan Way, nearly deserted of traffic on this snowy morning

Photograph I was taking while a car silently slid toward me down a hill

Snowboarders hoping to find a steep hill with enough snow downtown

The homeless have it especially tough in this weather; yes, there are warm shelters, but some people choose to sleep in doorways

A woman making her way through the sidewalk slush of Pioneer Square

People out and about in Pioneer Square, enjoying the rare snowy day

Suzanne Tidwell’s exhibit of knitted trees in Occidental Park, looking especially festive against the simple backdrop of snow

Tsonqua sculpture by Chinook Tribe artist Duane Pasco in Seattle’s Occidental Park, with a gull surveying the scene at the top of the totem

To fulfill their delivery mission, UPS trucks wear tire chains on these slippery and hilly streets

Cabs were a good way to get around the city, though it would have been a challenging job to be a taxi driver on a day like this

Cross-country skier on a pier, with container cranes in the distance

Snowman with pansy corsage I observed along the waterfront

Home of The Jetsons–actually, it is the monorail from the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair passing through Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen’s addition to the city–the EMP Museum (think Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana), designed by Frank Gehry

A sign preserved from the Skid Road era of Seattle

Witch Hazel blooming in January, in Waterfall Garden Park

Alley in Pioneer Square

By the way, here are a couple of not-to-be-missed videos of a skier launching off a high park in Seattle:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2012/01/20/watch-skiers-somersault-off-cliff-at-seattles-kerry-park/

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com (Just ask if you see a particular photograph you like; my website is not up to date) 

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

As twilight descended, a Snowy Owl gazed at us from a driftwood stump, alert with the promise of hunting in the coming hours. Just then, a reddish-orange moon rose above the horizon, over Grays Harbor along Washington State’s Pacific Ocean coast. Realizing the opportunity, I moved quickly into position, hoping to photograph the rising moon directly behind the sitting owl. The opportunity lasted about 30 seconds, then the moon distorted as clouds ate away at its edges. This brief experience capped a perfect day of watching and photographing Snowy Owls.

The owls use their wings to help lift themselves up to a higher point on a log

Since we have lived in Washington State, this was the third coming of the normally arctic Snowy Owls. There was one in 2006, and prior to that in the mid-1990s. I photographed the owls both times at Damon Point State Park–the place we returned to on January 8, 2012. This year there are a whole host of Hedwigs–Harry Potter’s pet Snowy Owl–at Damon Point, lending a wonderful opportunity to see this charismatic visitor from the arctic.

Damon Point sticks out into Grays Harbor, and is a spit of land constantly renewed and reshaped by harbor currents.  In fact, the landscape had changed so much since our last visit that we didn’t even recognize it.  There is a short asphalt road that leads directly into the ocean–a road to nowhere that used to lead far out on Damon Point.  It was washed away in winter storms, and now visitors have to hike out along the beach to Damon Point.

An alert Snowy Owl, with its bright yellow eyes staring at the photographer

This was the second time this winter we have seen Snowy Owls. The first time was in Michigan, during Christmas, when we were visiting family. We could have seen up to six Snowies at Tawas Point, a spur of land sticking out into Lake Huron that is probably a lot like the Damon Point landscape (minus the spectacular view of Mount Rainier and the Olympic Mountains over saltwater). But that was too far to drive with family, so we instead spent a couple of pleasant hours at the Muskegon sewage treatment facilities–located right next to the Muskegon dump–where we saw two Snowy Owls and enjoyed an aromatic picnic lunch.

The first time we ever saw Snowy Owls was during the mid-1980s, when we were living in Upstate New York. That year, the owls gathered along the lonely shoreline of Lake Ontario and were undoubtedly also visiting Michigan, Washington State, and the entire tier of far northern states.

The photographers we observed kept a respectful distance from the owls, and used long lenses to get close views

So, the Snowy Owls come down from their normal arctic home about once every decade, in a winter-long invasion that is known as an irruption. Birders long thought that the owls came south because they were hungry. But this year, a new theory has emerged. There was an excellent crop of arctic lemmings during the summer of 2011, which led to the survival and maturing of an excellent crop of Snowy Owls. This high concentration of owls wasn’t sustainable over the bleak midwinter, so many of the owls dispersed southward to the areas we are seeing them now. According to the new theory, they are not starving and are not under a lot of stress. In fact, their lives don’t look too bad; they seem to be enjoying a coastal winter of sleeping and eating–much like the human snowbirds who head to the Gulf Coast for the winter.

Damon Point State Park is a spit of land that is constantly changing, as ocean currents add to it or nibble away at its features

Snowy Owls prefer to winter in places that remind them of home: flat and mostly treeless expanses that are reminiscent of arctic tundra. That’s why some of the best places to see them are airports and wild lands along shores of the Pacific Ocean and Great Lakes. One Snowy Owl took the winter vacation concept a bit too seriously, and ended up at the Honolulu airport in late 2011. It was the first Snowy ever recorded in Hawaii, and it was promptly shot by overzealous airport officials (something about an illegal foreign national threatening an airport …).

At sunset, warm light bathed the owls; after a day of lounging, they were getting ready for the evening hunt

Back to Damon Point. Visiting this lonely stretch of land is always a wonderful experience. On our 2006 visit, we saw the remains of a lost shipwreck that was melting out of the sands. The S.S. Catala had an interesting history, according to a June 2, 2006 article in the Seattle Times:

“Built in Scotland in 1925, the steamer carried woodsmen and miners from British Columbia to Alaska before serving as a floating hotel in Seattle for the 1962 World’s Fair. It ended up being towed to Ocean Shores to be a hotel for charter fishermen — complete with poker games and prostitutes — until it tipped over in a storm in 1965.”

In 2006, the S.S. Catala was determined to be leaking oil and was completely scrapped by the State of Washington.

On our 2012 visit, there were surfers and birders and beachcombers and photographers … perhaps 30 serious photographers. This was a huge change from my previous visits. In the mid-1990s, I don’t remember any other photographers out there. I was using film, and exposures of the white owls were tricky (it didn’t help that my lab made a mistake and processed my three days of owl slides at the wrong setting). Now, wildlife photography, even of white owls, is amazingly easy. We can check our exposures and focus immediately and adjust accordingly. This winter will produce an incredible number of great Snowy Owl photographs from hundreds upon hundreds of photographers.

So, what do the owls eat in a landscape lacking lemmings?  Ducks and rats and mice and voles and yappy little dogs. Okay, I made up the last prey item; on the other hand, I wouldn’t put it past them … so if you love little Pooky, keep her on a leash!

We observed about ten Snowy Owls at Damon Point on January 8. There were almost certainly more, as there is a whole area of the peninsula that we did not visit. The hike out to see the owls near the point is about 1.5 miles each way. The owls generally sit on driftwood logs and stumps that are low to the ground. I learned that as the winter progresses, these flat-and-barren-land owls get used to the idea of vertical space–as in trees–and start using higher vantage points. We noticed some doing this already, though most perched low to the ground.

Snowy Owl in flight over Damon Point. Ideally, there would be few owl flights during the day, but with so many visitors coming to see the owls, occasionally one will get disturbed and take flight for a hundred yards or so.

During the day, the owls are mostly napping. When a birder or photographer or dog walker gets within a bird’s comfort zone, it may snap open its yellow eyes and check out the intruder. If it feels threatened, it will take flight and head off a hundred yards or so to a more isolated perch. So, if you go, keep this comfort zone in mind and act responsibly so that others can view the owls.

Alpenglow on Mount Rainier, viewed over Grays Harbor from Damon Point

After photographing the Snowy Owl against the Wolf Moon (one traditional name for the January full moon), we watched the intense pink alpenglow fade on Mount Rainier and saw the last sunset glow fade from the clouds over the Pacific Ocean. The long walk back along beach was accompanied by the cadence of crashing waves and the crunch of cockle shells underfoot.

The January “Wolf Moon” rose over Grays Harbor at sunset, capping off a wonderful day on the coast

Birds ruffle their feathers to rearrange them, fluff them, and presumably make them a more comfortable covering; owls are no exception. It amazes me that this chaos of feathers ends up perfectly arranged.

Humans, dogs, and owls like a nice muscle stretch after staying in the same position for a long period

Sunset glow on an owl getting ready to hunt

The owls liked to perch on or near one of the numerous driftwood logs and stumps washed in by winter storms

A wildlife photographer in beautiful light, just waiting for the perfect composition

Immature and female Snowy Owls tend to be darker, with more patterning, than the nearly pure white adult males; although rules like this are made to be broken

Using its wings to help hop higher on a beach log; wouldn’t it be great if we had wings to help us hop up mountains?

These owls are graceful flyers, with strong and rhythmic wingbeats

In flight over the grassy beach at Damon Point, with a few short conifers in the distance

A sleepy Snowy Owl yawning (I am so prone to yawning that I yawned as I looked at this picture and typed this caption)

Flying to a quieter location farther out on the point

Waves lapping in along the beach of Damon Point, where we observed the shells of delicious Razor Clams and Heart Cockles

We absolutely loved this day of birding along the outer coast!

For further information about Damon Point State Park, go to Damon Point State Park; there was no sign for the park on our January 2012 visit, but it sits directly adjacent to a private campground, and there are usually cars parked neatly off the road at the entrance.  Birders tend to like Subarus, so just look for the Subarus. The owls will probably be at Damon Point until March 2012.  Then it will be years before they return.

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

The nearly black Silver Fox sat atop the fresh snow, peering down intently with its ears and eyes focused on a nearby spot under the snow. We watched for several minutes, and I told Karen I would like to continue watching, because something was going to happen. Suddenly the fox leaped high into the air, kicked its legs up and dove face first down into the snow. It apparently pinned the mouse it was after, using its paws, then ate it. The fox came up licking its chops, then sauntered into the forest.

The sequence of a fox naturally hunting a mouse under the snow, described above

This fox, a high mountain subspecies known to scientists as the Cascade Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes cascadensis), lives in the high country of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. It has always been considered secretive and has been seldom seen by hikers and park visitors. That is, until recently.

Our Silver Fox was mousing among the cabins at Longmire, a settlement of National Park Service staff and lodge visitors on the road to Paradise. Nearby, a second Red Fox with the reddish-orange coloration more typical of the species, sat lazily in the sun. I watched it from about 20 feet away, as it woke up from its sleepiness, yawned, and stretched, before trotting off to work.

A second Red Fox, this one with more typical coloration, luxuriates in the weak winter sun

Yawning and stretching before getting back to work

And work turned out to be scavenging in the parking lots of Longmire for cracker crumbs, spilled drinks, and whatever other human food was offered. Begging and scavenging was certainly easier than hunting for rodents.

Recent visitors to Mount Rainier now see Red Foxes routinely at Longmire, Paradise, and even as high as the climbers’ shelter at Camp Muir, high on the snowy mountain. The foxes appear to have quickly adapted to human visitors; I didn’t see foxes routinely on visits to Mount Rainier National Park until two years ago. Now I see one or more on nearly every trip.

This fox’s “work” consists of trotting around the parking lot at Longmire, looking for spilled food

And if it gets really lucky, a foolish visitor may feed it from outstretched fingers

I love seeing the foxes. Other visitors love seeing the foxes. The irony I see is that the thrill of seeing these foxes is a direct result of activity–people feeding them–that is unwise, against park policy, and will result in a fox nipping a visitor, followed by the Park Service having to kill the fox and test it for rabies. So, despite the fun of seeing the foxes, it would be better if most of us did not routinely see them, because all the scavenging and begging will be the death of foxes. Sad but true. Though the bad behavior by others did allow me to get these pictures, which ends up being a guilty pleasure. So be it.

The park’s dilemma is how to keep people from feeding the foxes, much as they have had to keep people from feeding the bears and raccoons in many parks. I saw no signs warning visitors about feeding the foxes, but there has been a recent press release from the National Park Service warning that it is illegal to feed the foxes. I expect stronger enforcement from now on.

The Cascade Fox itself is fascinating. It seems that about half the individuals I’ve seen are the very dark Silver Fox, and about half are the more typical red color. These color variants occur in the same litter, and they are not different types of foxes.

These are truly magnificent animals

The Cascade Fox is a native of these high mountains, and does not occur in the lowlands. There are Red Foxes in the lowlands, and these were not native to the region and are genetically different. These foxes were introduced to the Puget Sound lowlands, some intentionally and some as escapees from fur farms. Now they are widespread, and I have seen them near my home. These two subspecies do not normally interbreed, as their habitats are so different and the vast forested foothills act as a barrier between them.

The photographs in this set represent two foxes who engaged in their natural behavior and in their unfortunate interaction with humans. I felt privileged to spend some time with them (and, no, I did not feed them!).

Snowy Mount Rainier suddenly revealed by parting clouds

Snowy conifer forest along the Wonderland Trail near Longmire

The Nisqually River descending The Mountain from the Nisqually Glacier

Snow falling off trees went straight down my back!

Silver Fox on the alert

For more in-depth scientific information about these foxes, go to The Cascade Red Fox, a doctoral dissertation by Keith Baker Aubry. For a recent public warning about feeding Mount Rainier’s foxes go to an article in the Tacoma News Tribune called Don’t Feed the Cascade Red Foxes.

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

Awakening at 4:00 a.m. on a frosty December morning, hours before dawn, we needed to leave early to see the December 10 lunar eclipse. The eclipse would begin around 5:00 a.m. and would be total at shortly after 6:00 a.m. in the Puget Sound Region. The TV weatherman warned that marine clouds would be arriving at about the same time, so seeing the eclipse was iffy.

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Sun, directly behind the Earth, casts the Earth’s shadow upon the full Moon. It begins by taking a nibble out of the Moon, then progressively devours more and more.  Eventually, the Moon turns an intense red, appearing as if Mars came calling for a sociable visit. Then, to the intense relief of thousands of generations of human observers, the Sun gradually returns the Moon to us in its normal form.

We left home at 4:30 a.m., and drove to a nearby clearcut in the forest, where we would get a clear view of the night sky. The problem was, clouds obscured the Moon. So we went to Plan B, and drove south to the Mud Bay shore of Puget Sound near Olympia. We found the Moon there, and saw an early nibble that had removed the upper left edge of the cookie. As we watched for about half an hour, the bite gradually increased in size.

Our cold reverie, while clad in long underwear, down coats, woolen hats, mittens, Sorrel boots, and our Antarctica parkas (we visited the frigid continent ten years ago today!), was relieved by the thrilling sight of the vanishing moon–and by the croaking guttural sound of a Harbor Seal a few feet offshore. We had seen a Harbor Seal lying on the mudflats here the day before; this was the first time we had heard one making the strange call–in which it may have been grudgingly acknowledging our presence.  Alas, the clouds came in and stole the eclipse from us, so we went to Plan C.

We high-tailed north of Olympia, to the entrance to Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, which was closed at this early hour. As we approached this spot, a Great Horned Owl flew by the car. Here we again had a great view of the eclipse, using a spotting scope and long lens. One car stopped briefly, the occupants asking if what they were seeing was an eclipse. Then the clouds caught up to us again, just as the Moon was starting to turn red.

Driving north quickly, in what became Plan D, we pulled off at another exit, where we took a long and loving view of the Moon as it turned deep red. This is where I was able to get the best photographs of the red globe. The advancing clouds caught up to us once again, and we drove further north.

Plan E took us to near one of the entrances to Joint Base Lewis McChord, where we watched the Moon sink into the clouds near the horizon, as a bit of the edge started to lighten with the retreat of the eclipse. A Great Blue Heron flew over, greeting the lightening sky to the east. We were at a place where we hoped not to be arrested for pointing our astronomical surveillance equipment at sensitive military installations, but no special ops forces swarmed us.

All in all, it was a thrilling prelude to dawn. We were lucky: the typical Puget Sound winter clouds had parted long enough for us to record the eclipse; as I write this several hours later, the clouds are thick, the day is dark, and drizzle has started. Our predawn eclipse chasing provided wondrous memories of still another amazing natural event.

For scientific information about this astronomical event, go to Total Lunar Eclipse. 

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

Autumn in the Pacific Northwest has never seemed as glorious as those Upper Peninsula or Vermont or Adirondack or Colorado autumns that I knew and loved earlier in my life. The trees don’t glow as brightly and the days don’t feel as sprightly and brisk. On the other hand–and there are always other hands with me–autumn in the northwest has its own magic of spawning salmon and dripping moss and golden Bigleaf Maples and scarlet huckleberries.

In search of the special qualities of a northwest autumn, I went hiking on four October days at Staircase, in Olympic National Park. Staircase is located on the southwestern part of the national park and, at about an hour away, is the closest access to where I live. Staircase is known for its Elk herd and for its rocky trail along the steep course of the North Fork Skokomish River, which tumbles joyfully from the Olympic Mountains. At Staircase there is a ranger station and a campground, and other routes along the river to explore.

Footbridge across Elk Creek, along the Shady Lane Trail; everything on the Olympic Peninsula eventually gets covered with moss

Alas, I don’t recall any staircases: it turns out that the area was named for the extremely steep trail that an early explorer built, and is now applied to the Staircase Rapids along the steeply pitched river.

These photographs represent those four lovely October days–a time when I desired to be nowhere else on earth.

Elk Creek winds through a forest of Bigleaf Maples near the point where it flows into the North Fork Skokomish River

A split view of the Skokomish, with the photographer in waders on a cold and colorful autumn day

Huge Bull Trout (close to 30″ long), a threatened species that migrates up the Skokomish from Lake Cushman every October to breed–much like a salmon swimming upstream

Bull Trout with fiery reflections of autumn leaves

I walked out over the Skokomish on these 3′ diameter fallen trunks, and could see skittish Bull Trout in the shadows cast by the logs

Reflections of Douglas Fir trunks and autumn Bigleaf Maples on the North Fork Skokomish River

The most vivid mushroom I’ve ever seen: a coral mushroom that goes by its scientific name of Ramaria araiospora var. rubella

I have a photograph of my mother and I standing in front of this giant cedar 20 years ago, when it was still standing; it fell a few years ago

The Usnea lichens I photographed are on this tree, with limbs hanging out over the river. For the impressionistic photos I got, with the golden background, I estimated that there were approximately four hours per year when the light would do what I wanted it to do.  I figured it out by my third day, and on my fourth day of photography, I got exactly what I wanted (represented by the first picture of this blog post and by the photos immediately below).

I have come to love a style of impressionistic photography that I have returned to often over the last few years, in which a few objects are in sharp focus against a wash of beautiful color created by distant plants (or shadows, or whatever) that are out of focus.  It lends a dreamlike feeling that works really well with an exotic subject like these strange lichens.

And here is a photograph that puts the lichens into their context, where they drip off maple branches. Usnea grows in northern regions around the world, and is noted for its sensitivity to air pollution–it dies even where pollution levels are relatively low (Olympic National Park has some of the cleanest air in America, so the lichen can grow long and prosper). For more information about Usnea, go to Usnea Lichen.

Sun catches ripples on the North Fork Skokomish, with scattered Bigleaf Maple leaves on the river bottom

A springboard notch, where loggers once inserted a board into the tree trunk so they could saw the tree at an appropriate height using an old-fashioned hand-powered, two-man “misery whip”

Moss forms over Bigleaf Maple roots exposed by the scouring action of Elk Creek

And a final look at the lovely river and its autumn maples

For further information about visiting Staircase, go to Staircase in Olympic National Park. This is important, as the road is closed to vehicle traffic during the winter.

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

The first time we visited Shi Shi Beach and Point of Arches in Olympic National Park, it was the Martin Luther King holiday weekend in January, 1991. The weather was unseasonably clear and cold, with no rain predicted–perfect for a winter backpacking trip. The beach was frosty and mostly deserted, though we met one melancholy couple who were enjoying a last Pacific Northwest backpacking trip before moving from Seattle to Iowa (not that there’s anything wrong with cornfields!).

Our favorite experience on that trip was exploring the tide pools of Point of Arches, where we saw Blood Stars and Aggregating Sea Anemones and Giant Green Anemones. In fact, we learned an important lesson during our last morning of tide pooling: they’re called TIDE pools for a reason. We lost track of time while I was photographing, and were late in deciding to walk back to the beach. When we came to a tidal channel that was blocking our route back, we realized that we didn’t have time to retrace our steps and look for an alternate route, and that we had to plunge through it. So, we waded nearly thigh deep through wintery saltwater in order to make it safely back. Lesson learned.

Sunflower Star and reflected light off sand ripples at lowest tide

On our 2011 Fourth of July hike to Point of Arches, we always kept the tide charts in the back of our minds. And we ended up having two of the best tide pool experiences of our naturalist lives. I’ll speak to the specific experiences in the captions, just suffice it to say that the Leather Stars, Blood Stars, chitons, crabs, sculpins, kelp, and isopods were endlessly fascinating.

Enjoy the pictures, and go tide pooling if you get a chance–especially with children. It is a fascinating glimpse into the watery world, which can seem like an alternative universe because the lifeforms are so different. Just be careful to observe the tide charts …

Hikers with a beautiful sunset backlighting the airborne sea spray

At lowest tide we climbed over rocks completely blanketed by slippery kelp; this tidal channel blocked our way from going any further, but here we were able to see a Leather Star–a sea star we had never before observed

The Ochre Sea Star comes in three major color variants, which are playing Twister on a barnacle-encrusted rock

The Sunflower Star encounters a Giant Green Anemone in a tide pool; notice how two of the star’s arms are recoiling after being stung by the anemone 

Up close and personal, the Giant Green Anemone’s mouth and tentacles look beautiful–and menacing to the creatures that are its prey. The green color comes from algae living in the tissues of the anemone. Interesting factoid: the anemone can push its stomach out through its mouth to give itself a deep-cleansing mouthwash!

Vosnesensky’s Isopod is a creature up to two inches long that looks like it might be a bedbug infesting the waterbed of a mermaid

The Blood Star is a small and stiff sea star that is a vivid scarlet

Velvety Red Sponge

Eye candy for those who love magenta and purple, this intricate seaweed defied my attempts to identify it

Purple Encrusting Sponge spreading over rough rock and exposed at low tide, with an Ochre Sea Star creating the foreground texture

Kelp completely covered many intertidal rocks; its color is a yellowish-brown, and here the slippery, shiny surface is reflecting the blue sky

Black Katy Chiton on a rough rock encrusted with other organisms

Blood Star with Giant Green Anemones

This Giant Green Anemone withdrew its tentacles as the tide went ever lower, leaving a ring of tracks around itself

Looking out from one of the sea caves–created by the pounding surf–at Point of Arches

In contrast to the soaring beauty of the wilderness beach; here is evidence that we are all connected to nature in rather mundane ways. This is one of three toilets the National Park Service provides for campers. And given the number of campers here on any nice weekend, I’m glad they provide the “facilities,” such as they are.

Our campfire on the beach at twilight, with the rocky sea stacks of Point of Arches marching out into the great Pacific

When the tide starts rushing in–as in this photograph–I look for a safe return route to the beach

Surfgrass waves gently back and forth with the surging and receding waves

This is a typical view of the exposed rocks as the tide starts to come in

A classic low tide view of Point of Arches, with the sea stacks reflected on the wet beach sand

And now for something a bit different: at sunset several people gathered on the beach to discuss this phenomenon. Some jokingly wondered if it was a UFO or if North Korea had launched an ICBM. Alas, the truth was that this slow moving trail was the contrail of a passenger jet coming over the horizon at the perfect time to be backlit by the setting sun.

Shi Shi Beach is a wilderness beach within Olympic National Park. It stretches over two miles in a gentle, sandy crescent, ending at the dramatic rocky sea stacks and arches of Point of Arches. We backpacked along the beach, and on this Fourth of July weekend we guess that there were 60 tents sharing the beach and the adjacent forest. Hikers need to be aware of the tides, which can have an amplitude of over ten feet and can affect hiking and tide pool exploration schedules at Point of Arches. Hard-sided food containers are required for backpackers (to keep away marauding Raccoons), as is a wilderness permit from the National Park Service and a recreational permit from the Makah Indian Reservation. Parking for backpackers is $10 per day at a private residence near the trailhead. For more information about Shi Shi Beach and Point of Arches, go to Olympic National Park: Shi Shi Beach and view my other two blog entries about Point of Arches at The Peregrine and the Pirate and Crab Chaos and Human Creativity.

I grew up in Detroit, where from the 1970s on, essentially nobody from suburbia ventured downtown, because of a fear of crime. As a result, the city withered and largely died, though today there are brave artists and urban farmers and other souls hoping to spur a renaissance of that historic rust belt city.

In contrast, Portland, Oregon, amazes me with its pulsing vision of what a thriving downtown can be. The heart of Portland looks like what Detroit may have been 75 years ago, with good restaurants, shops, hotels, and galleries everywhere. Light rail trains (MAX) and streetcars roll through the city and out to distant suburbs. People are everywhere on the streets, giving pedestrians a feeling of participation, excitement, and safety.

Bicyclists commuting to work across the Hawthorne Bridge

Bicycles are also everywhere. Portland has a slogan, “Bike City USA,” and over 6% of workers commute to their jobs by bicycle–an incredible number! Bicyclists zoom over four bridges crossing the Willamette River, and some cyclists double their green creds by boarding MAX with their bikes.

Hungry? Portland is the nation’s capital for food carts, with over 450 choices available throughout the city. Food carts are usually tiny trailers that each sell a limited menu of often ethnic cuisine. At noon, office workers pour down to the “pods” (pods are groups of food carts, usually set up around the perimeter of a parking lot) to get their choice of Thai, Polish, hippie, Indian, vegan, Mexican, fusion, sushi, and scores of other kinds of food. There is usually no

seating area, so people either stand around eating, take the food back to the office, or walk to a nearby urban park. I did the latter, with my excellent turkey, cucumber, and creme fraiche sandwich on a crusty long bun, where I sat near a group of scruffy teens who came to the city for the day to hang out with friends in the park. It took me back to the hippie days of old, when kids in bell bottoms and shoulder length hair and guitars would gather in parks all across America.

I enjoyed spending the day walking around town, camera in hand. On the other hand, there were all the beggars asking for spare change and foul-mouthed transients and a homeless gathering place along the Willamette. Portland certainly isn’t exempt from contemporary issues of joblessness, homelessness, and hopelessness. But it’s still a very cool city, and is a magnet drawing 20-somethings from everywhere.

Portland is a blend of modern skyscrapers, such as the Fox Tower, with delightful elements on the human, streetscape scale

A modest facade belies the fact that Powell’s Books in downtown Portland is the largest independent new and used bookstore in the entire world

The Pianobike Kid livens the streetscape in Portland with a moveable feast of music

TriMet MAX light rail trains run from the city to the suburbs, and are usually packed with passengers

Portland is known as the “Rose City” and “Bike City USA;” two residents boarding a MAX train illustrate why it deserves the nicknames

The Hawthorne Bridge viewed from Tom McCall Waterfront Park, a park named for a popular anti-growth Republican Governor who famously said, at the height of the first mass environmental movement in 1971, “Come visit us again and again. This is a state of excitement. But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.”

A blend of old and new, as a MAX light rail trail crosses the old Steel Bridge

I took this photograph along the bike corridor across the Steel Bridge, because I think it represents the “look” of industry a century ago

Colorful Mexican sodas lined up at the front of a food cart selling good food inspired by cuisine from south of the border

Portland is justifiably proud of itself, billing itself as “the city that works;” this sign greets visitors coming into the city

For those who want to know more about the food cart culture of Portland, go to Portland Food Carts

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

Interior of ice cave carved by the Cispus River in the Goat Rocks Wilderness of Gifford Pinchot National Forest

Standing before the ice cave entrance, I felt the menacing breath of the ice age upon me. Outside, the day was sunny and mild; inside the cave entrance, the atmosphere was dark, with a thin fog carried by the breeze coming down the long and icy corridor. The wind smelled of elemental rocks and ice, and carried a message of unrelenting cold.

Lower entrance of an ice cave in the  Summerland subalpine meadows of Mt. Rainier National Park

Ice caves, as they are known here in the Pacific Northwest, occur where a creek tumbling down a mountain cuts under a snowfield. An ice cave gradually enlarges as the summer wears on, and it eventually collapses and disappears with the melting of the snowfield. The summer of 2011 was colder than normal, and there was a heavy snowpack from late mountain snows last spring, so some of the snowfields will remain and will grow in thickness with new snow in the cold seasons ahead.

Translucent walls of the Summerland ice cave

The walls of ice caves become scalloped, much like the sun cups that form atop snowfields. The flowing stream, warmer than the frozen snow and ice, causes melting. And the patterns and colors are extraordinarily beautiful. In fact, I could become addicted to photographing every ice cave I found, except for one thing:

ICE CAVES ARE NOT SAFE!

The constant melting and collapsing along the route of the stream is exceedingly dangerous for humans. This point was brought home to me several years ago when my wife called and said she had been on a backpacking trip and was one of the first on the scene of a tragedy. A woman from Seattle had ventured into the entrance of an ice cave, and the roof suddenly collapsed, sending tons of ice down on her head and completely burying her. Despite the heroic efforts of hikers to dig her out using an ice axe, she was dead. This kind of tragedy has happened with regularity during the years I’ve lived in Washington State, and it serves as a warning to me.

Cispus River Ice Cave

Despite the look of my pictures here, I did not venture more than five feet into an ice cave, and I was crawling on cold earth with my feet in a frigid stream. Overhead, the ice layer was up to maybe six inches thick, and I made a calculated risk that even if the ceiling collapsed it didn’t have far to fall and wouldn’t have the momentum to kill me. To further hedge my bets, I had the camera on autofocus and autoexposure and shot blindly, by instinct, rather than trying to contort myself impossibly (and thus disturb the walls and roof of the cave) to look through the viewfinder. I used the LCD to check my results, and adjust my angles and exposures accordingly.

By the way, the beauty of these ice caves is an ephemeral beauty, since they normally disappear each year. Almost none of them have names, since they are essentially invisible to most hikers. In fact, the Big Four Ice Caves in Washington State’s Mt. Baker–Snoqualmie National Forest is the only named ice cave I can think of. These caves are off-limits to hikers because of deaths that occurred in 1998 and 2010, though there is a well-maintained trail that leads to the vicinity of the ice caves so that people can see the entrances.

 A Summerland ice cave at Mt. Rainier

There is another type of ice cave I would love to photograph: an ice cave through a glacier. Mt. Rainier had a spectacular ice cave near Paradise that lasted for decades, but it disappeared in the late 1980s with climate change and the retreat of Rainier’s glaciers. This cave was immense and was flooded with an eerie blue light that I associate with nuclear reactors. Alas, I’ll have to go somewhere else to see such a sight. Perhaps Iceland.

Upper entrance of a Summerland ice cave, with a torrent of meltwaters cascading into the snowfield

Scalloped walls of a Summerland ice cave

Atop a snowfield at Summerland, showing the melting formations known as suncups

Entrance to a Summerland ice cave

Upper entrance of the Cispus River ice cave, with the Goat Rocks (remnants of an old volcano that blew its top) in the distance

The Cispus River ice cave is colored by the deep blue of compressed snow and ice, and the red tint of watermelon snow–a coloration caused by a dense concentration of algae

Sculpted interior of a Cispus River ice cave

A final view of the Cispus River ice cave, which was small enough that it may no longer exist this year

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

“Drop Dead,” the trail name of a hiker looking dapper in a Panama hat and necktie, greeted us with a friendly smile and enthusiastic responses to all our questions. First, as to why a Pacific Crest Trail thru-hiker would be wearing a necktie:

“I was laid off in April, and you never know when you need to be prepared for a job interview.”

Good point. If I was hiring, Drop Dead would be a top choice. After all, this fit and energetic man in his mid-30s shows remarkable persistance; he has hiked nearly 2,300 miles at this point, where we met him in Washington State’s Goat Rocks Wilderness, averaging 30 to 35 miles per day. He has met and defeated the challenges of desert hiking and traveling through mile after mile of snowy wilderness. His creativity in looking neat and businesslike (far better than me after three days hiking!) after all those miles speaks to his ability to dress for success. Though he might have to work on that name …

Looking a bit sheepish, Drop Dead said his name came from the expression “drop dead gorgeous.” I’ll let the ladies be the judge, but with his red beard, partly done up in front with a thin braid, my guess is he would be a hippie girl’s heartthrob. Without the beard, he might be a boardroom lady executive’s passion.

The loneliness of the long-distance hiker

We asked Drop Dead about his diet; it turns out that he is a vegetarian, which is confirmation enough for me that a vegetarian can be in supremely good health. For breakfast, he eats uncooked quick oatmeal combined with dried fruit and dried milk. By not cooking in the morning, he can get on the trail fast, though I’m not sure the quick oatmeal would do much for me. At noon, he heats ramen mixed with peanut butter and chili paste to create a kind of low rent version of Pad Thai, using a tiny alcohol stove. He also supplements his diet with olive oil, and he was glad to accept a bit of chocolate and cheese from us.

We eventually ended our eager questioning, allowing Drop Dead to continue his hike north toward the Canadian border. I hope he gets just the right job interview along the way …

A rock cairn echoes the shape of Mount Adams, one of Washington State’s dramatic stratovolcanos

This stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail is high and beautiful; in fact, the spot where we met Drop Dead is within a mile of the highest point along the Washington State stretch of the PCT. Thru-hikers (those hiking the whole trail in one year) begin in early spring near the Mexican village of Campo, and finish in September or October at the Canadian border, in Manning Provincial Park. 2,650 miles long, the trail is a test of physical and psychological endurance.

Some 400 people started the trail this year, a higher number than the typical 300, largely because a lot of people are out of work because of the endless recession. When a person is out of work, and with poor prospects, why not take to the trail and pursue a long-repressed dream?

The Pacific Crest Trail travels the mountain ranges of California, Oregon, and Washington as it makes its run from the Mexican border to the Canadian border

This year, the trail turned into a real test of fortitude and guts. The High Sierra received tremendous amounts of snow last winter. So, after the hikers had endured the heat of the Mojave Desert, they ascended into the deep snows of Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia National Parks. Progress was exceedingly slow along the icy trail, and stream crossings with torrents of meltwaters were slippery and frigid hazards. Many hikers decided that this was not the year to complete their dream. Hikers also have to deal with forest fires and washouts along the way. We found it fascinating that many hikers carried umbrellas in their packs for rainy days; this would enable them to hike in lighter clothes and see better in the rain (most of us hikers wear Gore-Tex for rainy days, which can get uncomfortable inside during vigorous activity) than they could while wearing a hooded parka.

During our four sunny days in the Goat Rocks Wilderness, we encountered about ten thru-hikers, and chatted at some length with several.

Hercules was an energetic young man, wired with an iPod, with a big name to live up to. He did. Another hiker, Steady, told us that Hercules had hiked 62 miles in 24 hours in Oregon. It seems that Hercules was about out of food, and the lure of a good meal at Timberline Lodge was strong. When he got to the lodge, he consumed three enormous platefuls of great food! Hercules actually took his name on the first day of the hike, when a woman driving him to the trailhead suggested he needed a powerful name appropriate to his ancestry. Hence Hercules.

The Goat Rocks, dramatic in evening light, are the remains of a volcano that blew its top some two million years ago

Steady was an older hiker, from Cool, California (isn’t everything in California cool?), roughly my age, who averaged “just” a steady 20 miles per day. He was being accompanied through Washington by another grizzled friend, a man from Alpena, Michigan.

Bookworm, a thru-hiker from Maryland, had started with 50 lbs. of food and gear, but had whittled that down to about 30 at this point. His body weight had also been whittled down by over 20 lbs. Why “Bookworm?” Because he carried a Kindle for reading books. I asked him when he could possibly have time to read, and he said that he was able to read while preparing meals and a little bit before falling off to sleep. He was averaging one book per 100 miles, so at this point he had completed over 20 books. Bookworm also remarked that he was on his third pair of hiking boots, and that he now ate only cold food to avoid the weight of a stove and fuel.

Bookworm, looking thin and fit after months on the trail

Other hikers we met included Top Shelf, Picker, Slapshot, and Caddyshack, all of whom were strong and fast twenty-somethings. There was only one thru-hiker who hadn’t taken a trail name.

I will now raise a lightweight plastic cup of cold instant coffee to toast these Americans following their dreams. Hear, hear!

The dramatic terrain where the PCT winds through the Goat Rocks Wilderness

Lovely meadows of lupine, with Mount Adams in the distance, at Snowgrass Flats, just below the PCT in the Goat Rocks Wilderness

For information about the Pacific Crest Trail, a good starting place is the Pacific Crest Trail Association. Some of the hikers write blogs; you can find an index to some of these at PCT Journals. An even better source is Trail Journals, where one of the guys we met posted his observations of the Goat Rocks Wilderness (he loved it!), and scores of hikers blog about hiking the PCT this year.

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

After a family trauma that left me grieving, I chose to go home to Seattle by Amtrak rather than Delta, so that I could use the slower form of transportation as a way to quiet my sorrow. I hoped that the passing American landscape would sooth my soul.

I boarded Amtrak in Ann Arbor on a muggy summer morning; I was among the first at the station, but gradually the platform filled with about a hundred day trippers and overnighters, most going to Chicago for a Monday outing. In the seat in front of me, a little girl going to Chicago with her parents looked forward to going to the zoo, which her patient mom and dad explained repeatedly was the city of Kalamazoo–not the zoo of her imagination. After we passed through Kalamazoo and they didn’t get off the train, I think she got it. Her mother explained that they woud be visiting a museum and an aquarium, and that her little daughter was going to walk with a penguin.

Amtrak slowed repeatedly on the trip to Chicago, once stopping because of a signal light that may or may not have indicated an oncoming train (best to be prudent!). The Norfolk Southern, upon whose tracks Amtrak runs along this route, had designated parts of the tracks a 15 mph zone, so we crawled along past houses, farms, and fields. Then we had to pull over to stop for a faster freight train. After all this, we were over two hours late getting into Chicago.

Walking toward the train on the platform at Chicago’s Union Station

The lady conductor sternly gave us a lecture over the intercom that the delays were not Amtrak’s fault and “don’t go complainin’ to Amtrak–call the State of Michigan and Norfolk Southern if you are going to complain!” I was’t going to complain. Heck, it’s all an adventure to me, so I just chuckled.

At Union Station, we detrained and walked the platform back to the terminal, ears cowering next to the giant, hissing beasts. It would have been even more atmospheric if the locomotives had been black behemoths hissing steam, like they would have been 75 years ago when men were men and steam was king, but we live in a kinder, gentler age when oil is king and men are unemployed.

Inside Union Station it was anything but kinder and gentler. The place was packed. There was a lot of milling around and a lot of asking Amtrak employees where the portal to the next train woud be. I had to ask three employees before I got to the right gate, since the signage was so poor. But I at last arrived in the steerage waiting room, where people sat and stood and sprawled against every available wall. The place was packed. And hot. A giant fan worked overtime to ineffectively cool the room and effectively silence the announcements.

Upper Class train travelers, who book sleeping compartments, got better treatment. They walked into a darkened space with frosted glass doors that looked like the VIP lounges for first-class air travelers. But our waiting room made for a richer experience, if you like noise and heat and watching Amtrak cops chatting inside their sterile, air-conditioned office while the rest of us sweated outside.

After waiting a half hour, the young woman sitting next to me said she had never ridden the train before and wondered if she was in the right place. I asked what train she wanted, and she said “the Empire Builder,” and I assured her that she was in the right place. We waited. I asked about her trip and she had taken a bus from Tennessee to Chicago, and she was taking the train to Libby, Montana to see her fiance. I asked what he did for a living, and she said

he was retired military, a cop, and an EMT. Sounds like Superman, and he’ll be a good protector of her. I sensed that this shy and pretty woman, approaching thirty years old, had rarely been outside Tennessee. A vigorous older man sitting on the other side of me had a strong southern accent that seemed like what I had heard in rural southern Indiana or in West Virginia. He had a longish gray beard and an easy affability that allowed him to wait patiently and with a sense of humor.

Finally, a big woman from Amtrak sternly told us that the train was boarding and to show her your ticket as we passed. To each of us, she loudly admonished us to get in line “SINGLE FILE” after we passed her unsmiling face. She missed her calling: she should have been one of the occasional battle-axe teachers I observed in my youth (my favorite cartoon, Frazz, features one such teacher, Mrs. Olsen, to great effect).

We boarded. I sat down next to a man from Seattle. With typical Seattle reserve, he didn’t even glance up at me. But in 24 hours next to him, he did open up and say that dinner was “OK, but expensive.” And he said his steak was overdone. In my experience, a person could be stranded in the Seattle airport for a week and nobody would ever, ever talk to him. In contrast, I once waited in the waiting area of the Marquette airport in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and the sparkle of people chatting with strangers reminded me of the tinkle of stemware in an expensive restaurant. Coastal people, in general, are jaded and prefer separation, perhaps because they live packed so close together. Rural Midwesterners, by contrast, prefer connection.

The train shrieked and groaned out of the Chicago station: something was clearly wrong with our train car’s rear truck–it had a rubbing metal sound that occurred every time whe went around a curve at low speed. Had I been on a plane with that sound, I would have been praying!.

We passed derelict warehouses and factories, and overgrown yards, and enough rusty metal and graffitti-adorned buildings that the route felt like Chicago’s unofficial back alley–a fascinating place to dig for photographic treasure, but not a great place to live your life. Looking out the window at a dead end dirt road below the support columns of a road bridge, I saw a late model dark SUV with five beefy, unsmiling guys standing around it, one on a cell phone. The quick glimpse reminded me of a TV mafia story just before some guy got cement shoes to be used for his final dive into the Chicago River.

The woman sitting across the aisle from me was from Michigan. A hint: if you want to talk to somebody on a long trip, sit near a small town Midwesterner. She is from a rural area near Battle Creek in southern Michigan, and had been on the train from Kalamazoo. She told me then about being struck by lightning a few years ago: a tremendous bolt of lightning hit her house, then traveled in via the old wiring, slammed into her shoulder and out through her fingers and back into the wall. Meanwhile, she was knocked unconscious, tossed eight feet across the room, and burned and bruised on her arm. She awoke to her dog licking her face and the walls on fire around the room. She got out just in time … thank God for dogs! And for women from Michigan to entertain us with great stories!

On we snaked through Milwaukee, with more urban grunge. Farther on, up through Wisconsin forests and lake country. On to Minneapolis, where I fell asleep. I heard the next day that young people enjoyed the lounge that evening, with guitars and beers late into the night. Strangers on a train connect more effectively than strangers in virtually any other situation, perhaps because the surroundings and seats are comfortable and the atmosphere relaxed. Life stories are readily passed.

Night in a recliner seat. Stiff neck and need for coffee at dawn as we raced across the prairie. The pothole country of North Dakota gave us displays of brilliant American White Pelicans and red-stained Sandhill Cranes who had groomed their feathers with oxides from the mud where they feed. One young man ahead of me in the car was moving to Portland on this trip, accompanied by his guitar and by a potted Venus Flytrap that sat on his tray table. He said it looked much better than when he had started the journey and had the carnivorous plant sealed in a plastic bag. Apparently meat-eating plants like to breathe as much as meat-eating humans. His colorful left arm was covered with bright tattoos, looking much like all the other young people flocking to Portland in the great exodus of the decade. Portland is the glittering “City That Works” along the Willamette River, where commuting on bicycles is cool and food vendors in mobile food carts descend upon the city by the hundreds. There is even a funny TV show exploring this hip, young culture: Portlandia.

Three friendly young people were independently making their way to Rugby, North Dakota, which is kind of opposite of Portland in its hipness quotient. Still, one young woman had a bead of blue inserted in her lip piercing, so she wasn’t totally uncool. Her mother had moved to North Dakota from Wisconsin because the housing and land prices were so low and jobs were plentiful, with the lowest unemployment rate in the country during this endless recession. The shocker when she got there was that the jobs paid very little, so she had to get two jobs to make ends meet. Nothing is ever easy.

The prairies went on for hundreds of miles, punctuated by tiny towns with skyscraper grain elevators. The breadbasket of America, with the harvest starting in the golden fields. Not everything was golden; the town of Minot, North Dakota, had been the site of once-in-a-century flooding, and there were still farms and outbuildings surrounded by giant lakes where there should be no lakes. In the town, a sports park had been deeply gouged for its soil, which had been mounded high around some lower-lying buildings to provide a fortress against the flood. The train slowed considerably through this stretch, as the roadbed was just a bit over the waterline.

I had carried much of my food on the trip, but used the cafe to stoke up my alertness with periodic doses of coffee. Each morning, when we coffee drinkers got in line with puffy faces and uncombed hair, the lady attending the cafe laughingly greeted us with “How many?” We must have looked desperate for coffee. On the second afternoon, the train took on boxed dinners provided by a restaurant in a small Montana town, available for ten bucks. These included broasted chicken–a mostly western specialty I hadn’t enjoyed in some 30 years, as well as a roll and some good old-fashioned blackberry cobbler. The Dining Car offered more options, but was expensive for those of us on limited budgets. Most of the Dining Car diners had meals included with their private sleeping quarters.

We took on three private cars, which were attached to the back of the train while stopped at a Montana town. The Michigan woman decided to go check out one of the private cars, but as she walked close with her camera, several big guys with aviator sunglasses came out and gave her the evil eye, so she backed off.

Looking back at one of the private passenger cars hitched to the train

Michigan woman is a lover of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, as am I. She spent many weeks of her childhood in the U.P., and said that her first taste of whiskey–at age 11–came from John D. Voelker, an ex-Michigan Supreme Court judge who became widely famous under his pen name of Robert Traver. He wrote the classic Anatomy of a Murder, which was made into a popular 1959 movie starring Jimmy Stewart. The success of the book and movie allowed Voelker to retire to his beloved U.P.–he was born in the U.P. mining town of Ishpeming–to pursue a career of writing and trout fishing. As a teenager, I had read his wonderful book about fishing and whiskey drinking, Trout Madness, and had been captivated for a time by the classic and romantic sport of fly fishing.

Harvest time on the great American prairie

Two guys from the same Montana town–but who didn’t know each other–boarded the train in eastern Montana and plunked down in my end of the car. One immediately rose and walked down to the cafe to get a beer. Alas, the cafe was closed for 45 minutes for a staff break. From that moment on, I heard stories about craving beer. One guy was a construction worker whose long-term job was cleaning up an old lead mine site, which had heavy arsenic contamination. He said they were removing the contaminated waste and dumping it in a lined pit on the mountain, which would be sealed over when the job was complete. He was a vigorous thirty-something with a friendly and open Montana personality.

The other guy who came on board said he was really ashamed of something he had done, but he didn’t feel like talking about it. Finally, the cafe opened and the two guys got their beers, and that loosened them up. The younger guy, a twenty-something who now lived on the coast, had gone back to his small town for a wedding, and was arrested after the wedding and pled guilty to a DUI charge by a cop he had gone to school with (as in: “sorry, just doing my job”). He had his old acquaintance take his picture behind bars, as he was wearing his tuxedo. Now the guy faced the possible loss of his job, which involved driving, and a permanent stain on his record.

The other guy topped this story with his own background of two DUIs; the second one had cost him confiscation of two vehicles and spending seven days in jail. He figured that it cost him over $20,000, which probably didn’t include the long-term raises in his insurance. Both guys agreed that in their small town, lots of people thought drinking was the only thing to do. At least drinking on a train is a relatively benign activity, unless you are going to be driving right away when you reach your destination. I drifted to sleep as the Amtrak attendant shuffled the noisy drinkers off to the observation car so that we teetotalers could get some shuteye.

When I awoke, all the people I had talked to had vanished at remote Montana stops in the night. I changed clothes in a changing room, then lurched down to the dining car–staggering because the tracks are pretty rough in places. It reminded me of being on a small ocean-going ship during a storm. I was seated at a singles table with three others who had no dining companions. I turned out to be the most talkative of the bunch, which will astound and amaze everyone who knows me. Two of the other three were from Seattle (remember my comments above about Seattle reserve?), and the other was a lady from Oswego, New York, who was going to the Seattle area to see her son, whom she hadn’t seen in five years. Five years … really … what’s the son’s excuse for that?! She and her kids had often been to the nature center I once managed in the Syracuse area, near her hometown of Oswego. One of the Seattle guys owns a sailboat for navigating Puget Sound, as well as a cabin in an old gold-mining area of the Cascades; he said that if he is down in the Olympia area, he’ll look me up for a sailing trip on the Sound.

Breakfast, for me, was an excellent spinach and cheese omelet, with American fries and good coffee. The service was good, but the table setting was not the storied linen tablecloths of the classic days of train travel. The tablecloth and napkins were paper, the coffee cups were styrafoam, the china was plastic (though not made in China) … but at least the flatwear was classic metal. After several cups of coffee and pleasant breakfast conversation, I went back to my seat and enjoyed the view of the channeled scablands of eastern Washington.

The channeled scablands were formed when ice dams suddenly broke open during the ice age, sending unbelievable sudden surges coursing through the thick volcanic basalt formations of eastern Washington, ripping away solid rock and creating networks of channels. Now only the remnants of those natural catastrophes remain: basalt cliffs rise above sagebrush valleys, telling stories that geologists were able to piece together from clues on the landscape. As the train thundered westward, hawks and Great Blue Herons constantly fled the noise and commotion, flying away from the tracks and small wetlands toward distant refuge.

Speaking of noise: the train is not nearly as noisy as might be expected. The engine was so far ahead that I could hear no engine noise and I could only faintly hear the train’s whistle–used when approaching highway crossings–when I thought about listening for it. Inside the train cars, there was a constant soft hiss from the ventilation system, which creates a soothing white noise that I found relaxing. There is no clickity-clack of the rail joints these days, since the tracks are now made using long stretches of continuous welded rail.

Approaching Stevens Pass in Washington State’s Cascade Mountains, the train was again delayed, this time by a freight train having engine trouble on the west side of the pass. The Conductor estimated a delay of an hour. Actually, delays of Amtrak trains are common, because freight trains have the right-of-way on tracks operated by private railroads. For these railroads, Amtrak is an inconvenience–but also a source of revenue, so they probably don’t want it to go away.

Several National Park Service volunteers boarded the train in eastern Washington, and went on the loudspeaker to interpret the passing landscape for us, adding to the richness of the trip. They told us about early settlers and Indians and the Columbia River and the apple orchards and such. They did not, however, tell us the history of one of the greatest train disasters in the history of America, which occurred along this very route over Stevens Pass. Perhaps Amtrak and/or the National Park Service are afraid of upsetting delicate sensibilities, but the Wellington Train Disaster is a great story.

In late March of 1911, two trains were stopped at Wellington in a place very close to where we were stopped on our journey. Except that it was the dead of winter, in a blizzard. They were stranded for six days in the blizzard; on the seventh day an avalanche roared down the mountains, sweeping the train cars off the tracks. When it was all over, 96 people were dead in the greatest natural disaster ever to hit Washington State (that is, until the next big earthquake …). To read more about this event, which “celebrated” a 100th year anniversary in 2011, go to Wellington Train Disaster. A long tunnel, built in 1929, dramatically reduced the avalanche hazard for train travelers.

Crossing the Columbia on a steel railroad bridge

During our one hour delay–without avalanches, thank God–riders patiently occupied themselves. Lots of books were open, but no Kindles, perhaps because coach passengers on a train tend to be traditional. My part of the car had four Macs in operation (one guy working on a spreadsheet, one gal watching a movie, one guy writing code, and me writing this story), and occasional PCs. One lady knitted. One played solitaire. Several slept. Some chatted to seatmates. One demonstated something to the attendant on an iPad. Many used iPods or similar equipment to listen to music or watch recorded video. But it was all the books that impressed me most; people who ride trains still like to read–a slower-paced activity in this digital age. Considering that we were running four hours late on this route, there was little grousing about lost time. In a sense, the delays were a gift of quiet personal time for us–a rare commodity in this caffeinated and over-stimulated age.

The Empire Builder chugs through the open landscapes of eastern Washington State

Traveling on, we reached Puget Sound and snaked right along the edge of the Sound in what would be prime real estate if the railroad tracks didn’t run there. It gave me a view of a part of the region that I had never seen before. Finally, we arrived in Seattle, creaking our way through a tunnel before arriving at the King Street Station, which I officially designate as the armpit of Seattle, the status of which may change pending future renovation. Tired, I detrained and wheeled my suitcase 0.7 miles to the ferry terminal, so I could take the last leg of the journey home on a ferry across Puget Sound to Bremerton.

Would I take Amtrak again? Absolutely! This is a civilized way to travel, on a human time scale, that is more energy efficient by far than planes and cars and is kinder to our sense of time (with no jet lag!!!!). The seats are comfortable, and the quiet time without the constant distractions (for me) of radio and television and the internet gave me many hours of quiet work and reflection and observation. The Amtrak attendant for our car was new in her job and couldn’t have been any nicer to all of us. I made friends with two people, Dave and Wyn, and gave them my contact information. What more could you wish for on a trip with total strangers?

The trip was also inherently beautiful, an unwinding mural of the great American landscape, from the lush midwestern farms and decaying rust belt cities, to the endless prairies with big skies, to the towering Rocky Mountains, to the dark fir forests of the Cascades, to quiet Puget Sound with hardly a ripple on this pleasant summer afternoon. All this made for a stunning trip loved by most everyone on board.

The journey succeeded in another way. It salved my soul a bit, after the death of my mother, with the gift of time and quiet and the fleeting friendship of fellow travelers.

We reach the shore of Puget Sound north of Seattle

A note about the photography: I played with the camera a lot during this journey in order to give a poetic and impressionistic feeling for the passing landscape. I overcame the challenges of dirty windows and sun glaring in and high rail speeds using long exposures and quick grab shots. There are no second chances for photos at track speed, so I had to use all my accumulated skills to get these photos. And I came away pleased.

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

Nature is rarely orderly and tidy–and to a naturalist, that is part of its charm. On the other hand, an artist can sometimes use natural materials to bring order to that chaos, with marvelous results.

As we walked down sandy Shi Shi Beach among the beached seaweed, swarming sand fleas, a dead and stinking sea lion, and a zillion crab carcasses, two National Park Service rangers greeted us.

Crab parts on the Shi Shi Beach, with the dramatic sea stacks of Point of Arches in the distance

One said “Everyone is asking about all the crabs along the beach. They aren’t actually dead bodies; they are the molted shells of crabs that have outgrown their old bodies and discarded them.”

Dungeness Crab parts rolling in and out with the waves 

So it wasn’t mass suicide or a toxic oil spill or global warming that killed a million crabs. In fact, it was just an ordinary yearly molt that we were privileged to see, and the crabs of the deep were still alive and enjoying a growth spurt as they muscled their way out of their old exoskeletons and ate their way into new and larger clothes. Meanwhile, the discarded crab parts moved gently in and out with the waves in a spectacular jumble that left every beach visitor wondering–until they learned the truth,

I had thought about putting a few of these crab carapaces into an arrangement to photograph, but someone with grander ambitions and more time beat me to the punch. On our way back up the beach, we encountered a spiral of crab backs (known as “carapaces”) that looked at first like a giant ship’s rope that someone had neatly coiled. When I walked up to it, I stared in utter amazement and surprise at the fleeting work of art that someone had created. Executed with technical perfection and a fine artistic vision, the crab spiral celebrated nature, yet it did so within the very human needs for order and art. Line, texture, and repetition of forms were among the artistic elements employed. The crab spiral was an ephemeral masterpiece by an unknown artist!

The crab spiral as we found it, left by an unknown artist

Detail of the arrangement of crab carapaces

It would have taken the artist hours and hours of exacting work to create this ephemeral work; notice how uniform the crab backs are in size and shape

The setting, with Point of Arches distant

Karen Rentz repeated this backpacking trip two weeks later, and found that the Crab Spiral was no more. High tides had claimed it. Nature’s love of chaos beat back the human need for order, but I got the photographs that illustrate what the human imagination is capable of, even on a remote wilderness beach.

For those interested in the intersection of nature and art, the acknowledged master is artist Andy Goldsworthy. You can see an excellent selection of his work at Andy Goldsworthy.

With the careful placement of these barnacles growing naturally on a molted crab shell, nature looks to be playing the trickster!

Shi Shi Beach is a wilderness beach within Olympic National Park. It stretches over two miles in a gentle, sandy crescent, ending at the dramatic rocky sea stacks and arches of Point of Arches. We backpacked along the beach, and on this Fourth of July weekend we guess that there were 60 tents sharing the beach and the adjacent forest. Hikers need to be aware of the tides, which can have an amplitude of over ten feet and can affect hiking and tide pool exploration schedules at Point of Arches. Hard-sided food containers are required for backpackers (to keep away marauding Raccoons), as is a wilderness permit from the National Park Service and a recreational permit from the Makah Indian Reservation. Parking for backpackers is $10 per day at a private residence near the trailhead.For more information about Shi Shi Beach and Point of Arches, go to Olympic National Park: Shi Shi Beach.

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

When humans don’t behave by human standards, we call it criminal. When wildlife doesn’t behave according to human standards, we call it fascinating–especially when the behavior involves two iconic species once categorized as endangered. The wild piracy portrayed here occurred on Shi Shi Beach along the Pacific Ocean, in Olympic National Park.

Nervous gulls take to the air from their resting and bathing site at the mouth of Willoughby Creek along Shi Shi Beach

As we crossed Willoughby Creek along the sandy shores of Shi Shi Beach, vacationing biologist Mike Layes greeted us and pointed out a Peregrine Falcon about 100 feet away, perched atop a dead gull on the beach. Mike had been camping, and said he had seen the falcon make several kills where the stream meets the Pacific Ocean.The falcon looked briefly at us, then resumed plucking bright white feathers from the gull it had just killed.

Peregrine Falcon feeding on gull

The mouth of Willoughby Creek is a gathering place for gulls, who drink from and bathe in its waters and seek protection in numbers of its own kind. In fact, when we were hiking down the beach, looking for a place we could get water, I had mentioned to Karen that the gathering of gulls ahead looked like it could be at a source of fresh water. Turned out, it was.

Gulls gathered at the mouth of Willoughby Creek

The gathering of gulls didn’t provide safety in numbers in this instance. Mike said the falcon dove fast and hard on the gulls, scattering them and giving it an opportunity to take one down. The strange thing was, once the falcon began defeathering and devouring the dead gull, other gulls landed and settled back into their routines–just twenty five feet away! Maybe they figured that the victim had it coming. More likely, they had seen it all before and figured they were safe as long as the predator was occupied with lunch.

Peregrine with a gull feather in its beak

The falcon sees the Bald Eagle targeting his prey

The falcon dug into its meal, holding down the carcass with its talons as it tugged on the meat. Suddenly it became alert and looked south. In the distance, from the sea stacks of Point of Arches, we saw a distant Bald Eagle heading straight toward us. The falcon instantly took to the air, like a fighter pilot taking off to intercept an enemy bomber. The eagle closed the distance quickly, and withstood the missiles of hate that the falcon aimed its way. Then the eagle wheeled in the sky above us, and descended toward the falcon’s gull carcass. It missed the first time, but on the second swoop it adeptly grabbed the carcass in its talons, on the fly, and began slowly gaining altitude. We watched as the enraged Peregrine Falcon buzzed it with all the skill of a Top Gun. Alas, all to no avail as the eagle flew with its pirated treasure back to the sea stacks at Point of Arches.

Bald Eagle with its eyes fixed on the falcon’s prey

Bald Eagle with dead gull in its talons, being buzzed by an angry Peregrine Falcon

During his day on the beach, the biologist had seen this battle scenario repeated three times. We went back the next day and the next, and sat and waited for another display of aerial combat. Alas, it was not to be. Apparently the falcon decided that three strikes and he was out.

You can view a video of the event on YouTube at: The Peregrine and the Pirate.

Peregrine Falcon headed back to the sea stacks at Point of Arches

We did see the falcon once more; it came to quietly drink from Willoughby Creek, high on the beach, as we and others watched it from about 100 feet away.

We saw Brown Pelicans and Black Oystercatchers along the shore, and Wilson’s Warblers and a Hermit Thrush in our campsite, but the alpha experience was watching a professional pirate at work, skillfully turning the falcon’s ability to hunt to its own advantage. Arrrgggh!

Feathers plucked from the gull by the Peregrine Falcon, now floating at the edge of Willoughby Creek

Shi Shi Beach is a wilderness beach within Olympic National Park. It stretches over two miles in a gentle, sandy crescent, ending at the dramatic rocky sea stacks and arches of Point of Arches. We backpacked along the beach, and on this Fourth of July weekend we guessed that there were 60 tents sharing the beach and the adjacent forest. Hikers need to be aware of the tides, which can have an amplitude of over ten feet and can affect hiking and tide pool exploration schedules at Point of Arches. Hard-sided food containers are required for backpackers (to keep away marauding Raccoons), as is a wilderness permit from the National Park Service and a recreational permit from the Makah Indian Reservation. Parking for backpackers is $10 per day at a private residence near the trailhead. For more information about Shi Shi Beach and Point of Arches, go to Olympic National Park: Shi Shi Beach.

Eyes and cameras raised, squinting at the glaring sun, we were amazed as an unexpected phenomenon took place in the sky. There was a perfect halo circling the sun, showing the faint colors of a rainbow. Nature once again put on a great show, this one visible from the park where I was showing my photography in suburban Portland, Oregon.

Sky phenomena are the result of physics, so bear with my numbers and technical information. My photographs show several aspects of the phenomenon, which is known as the “22° Halo.” It was quite wide in the sky, and I barely captured the whole circle with a wide 24mm lens. The rainbow prism is almost precisely at 22° out from the center of the sun. There is a second ring visible in the corners of the photo; this is a 46° Halo, which is supposed to be rarer than the 22° Halo. The sky color inside the 22° Halo is darker than the sky color outside the ring.

A faint second halo appears at 46°

These halos are caused by incoming thin and wispy cirrus clouds, which are often a harbinger of coming rain after a sunny day (indeed, it rained the next day after this halo). These clouds consist of tiny, hexagonal ice crystals; when sunlight passes through the crystals, it refracts out at the 22° angle and separates into the colors of a prism.

That’s the extent of my technical knowledge, but once again, seeing something new in nature revived my sense of wonder. And isn’t that one of the wonderful aspects of being outdoors?

Another view of the wispy cirrus clouds with the sun, signaling a change in the weather 

One word of warning: I was extremely careful in pointing my camera at the sun and looking through the viewfinder not to look directly at the sun. The human retina is fragile and can be burnt beyond repair. Don’t look directly into the sun!

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

Life goes to all lengths to get sex; after all, without sex, we have no birds, bees, or babies. But some sex is just plain weird, as in the case of the Corpse Flower (Amorphophallus titanum). Think about the root meaning of those Latin words for a moment, and you will understand why Sir David Attenborough came up with the less “dirty” name of Titan Arum to use in his BBS television series, The Secret Life of Plants, instead of the scientific name.

Corpse Flower is a gigantic botanical simulation of rotting meat, complete with a fetid odor and a deep burgundy color to help create the illusion. It even raises its own temperature to make the illusion of decomposing meat more real. And who is it trying to attract with all this grossness? Why, carrion beetles and flesh flies, of course, which are its pollinators! Everything it does, it does for sex–kind of like some politicians who make the news, but we won’t go there …

Impressive in size, the Corpse Flower blooms only occasionally through the years, and sports the color, temperature, and fetid smell of a large rotting animal

I went to the University of Washington botany greenhouses in Seattle, after seeing a story in the Seattle Times about how this plant was about to bloom. On that afternoon of June 9, I joined about 60 people in line to wait for our chance to file past the magnificent plant and experience its sensory pleasures. Alas, my sense of smell is not working well because of seasonal allergies, so I couldn’t smell a thing. It’s just as well, based on some of the descriptions of the gag-inducing stink, which is said to be so bad that it can make a person’s eyes water.

Anyway, the plant was gigantic and most impressive; those of us who stood in line were rewarded with the chance to climb a ladder and look down inside the flower. The cutest among us were also rewarded with having pictures taken by a media photographer (he didn’t bother with me).

Climbing a ladder to view the Corpse Flower’s interior

Corpse Flower lives naturally in the Sumatra rainforest, but it has relatives here in North America, including Calla Lily and Skunk Cabbage. The Eastern Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus), which grows in swamps in places I’ve lived, including Michigan and New York, also has a meat color, strong odor, and the ability to generate heat–which helps it melt snow in early spring, AND to spread its wondrous odor better.

Now the flowering event is over, and it is time to patiently wait for that 100+ lb. root to decide that it’s time once again to surprise us with a magnificent bloom. It might happen in a couple of years, or perhaps in a human lifetime. Nobody knows, and that is part of the wonder of its nature.

University of Washington botany greenhouse, with the Corpse Flower visible inside

Virtually everyone took a picture of the gigantic flower

Wikipedia has a good article about the natural history of this amazing plant; go to: Corpse Flower.

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

When I was a boy, my friend across the street loved butterflies, and he ran around the neighborhood with a butterfly net in hand, with one of those intense passions that young boys often develop. I didn’t share his butterfly passion, but I also loved being outdoors. The boys in the neighborhood all had bikes, and we would bike into town or to a park several miles away or to a baseball diamond for a pickup game. The freedom of summer was a wonderful, unstructured time that allowed for childhood exploration and creativity, without today’s parental concerns about evil lurking down the street.

The bright purples and yellows of spring wildflowers attract older people with their beauty–and they attract butterflies and bugs and thus kids who take a natural interest in insects

So it was wonderful to see a mother and her seven year old son–I’ll call him “Tim”–having a wonderful time outdoors at the recent Wenas State Audubon Campout that Karen and I attended. Tim watched Red-Naped Sapsuckers drilling into a tree; found the first Grass Widow flower on a botany hike; and spent a lot of time chasing and catching grasshoppers in the mountain meadows. He and his mother were car-pooling with us for two hikes; at the end of one hike he walked up to me and said that he hoped I didn’t die, because I was the driver to get him back to camp. Kids say the darndest things!

Tim wasn’t the only child on the trip. Among the 120+ Audubon campers, there were roughly a dozen children, all of whom seemed to be having a great time. I wish there had been more. In Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods, he stated his mission of “saving our children from nature-deficit disorder.” His thesis is that unstructured time in nature is important for children, for their intellectual and creative development, and that they are not getting this vital childhood experience. He believes that this lack of nature experiences fuels the obesity, attention deficit disorders, and depression that have become much more common in recent years.

A young ground squirrel ready to duck into its burrow for safety from the big, mean humans

Let’s face it: we all spend too much time in front of colorful electronic screens. Children are not exempt, and the addictive [I use that word intentionally and from personal experience] nature of activities on computers, game consoles, and smart phones may be especially dangerous for young minds that need broad experiences, not the simple stimulus/reward experiences of gaming, Facebook, instant messaging, and online shopping.

End of rant. Just get you and your kids out there enjoying nature close to home or far away!

The Wenas State Audubon Campout is a great place to spend Memorial Day Weekend. The Wenas Campground, once a Boise Cascade public campground now owned by the State of Washington, is a big, flat Ponderosa Pine forest along Wenas Creek on the drier east side of the Cascade Mountains. People are

Camping at Wenas Campground under Ponderosa Pines and among lupines

Our campsite during a rainy evening in 2010

free to camp anywhere, except within 50′ of the creek, and the place can absorb probably thousands of campers. In the past few years, there have been groups of ATV riders and horse riders, in addition to the Audubon campers. Everyone needs to bring their own food, cooking supplies, and water. This year Karen and I set up a cook tent, in addition to our sleeping tent, because last year it rained while we were cooking.

Who can go?  Anyone.  Arrive any time and leave any time. There is no formal structure, except for meeting at assigned times for particular hikes. And that informal flexibility is part of the beauty of the weekend. There are no fees, except the voluntary donations for portable toilets and for the group camping permit. The weekend is filled with free group hikes to see birds and wildflowers in mountain and sagebrush habitats, plus campfire programs and owl prowls.

Owl Prowl leader Neil Zimmerman called in a tiny Pygmy Owl at the campground’s edge using his voice and recorded sounds; here it is illuminated by flashlight

It is so enjoyable that I’m surprised that many more people don’t take advantage of the experience.

It was wonderful to spend the weekend with people of all levels of knowledge and who are willing to share that knowledge. We saw our second Pygmy Owl and Northern Saw-Whet Owl on this trip, and last year we saw our first Long-Eared Owls. Don Knoke led some memorable botany hikes, and we had a chance to see an unusual native Brown Peony for the first time. Knoke also sets up plant identification boards around the Larrimer Tree, a big Ponderosa Pine

Plants of the sagebrush-steppe community, identified for we rain forest mossbacks of the Puget Sound area

along the stream, with a wide selection of native plants kept alive in little tube vases and on display so that people can learn about the different wildflowers of the sagebrush-steppe community.

This year we enjoyed a special new experience–visiting and birding 400+ acre Green Ranch in the Wenas Valley, now owned by a woman who had been a part of the Audubon Campout for years. She is dedicated to good stewardship of the land, which consists of riverbank forest, open pastures, and a beautiful old

Classic old barn interior on a Wenas Valley ranch

barn and outbuildings–as well as a collection (inherited from the previous owner) of several dozen old and decaying Volvos lined up near the barns; you may have heard of Cadillac Ranch; some people have called this Volvo Ranch! Note that this ranch is private land, and the visit during the Wenas Campout was by private invitation.

Over 40 of us went birding on Green Ranch, by special invitation of the owner, where we saw a good variety of birds, including Bullock’s Oriole, Western Tanager, lots of warblers, and a Wild Turkey egg

The Wenas Audubon Campout just completed its 48th year, so it is a well-established tradition that I hope will continue for decades to come. Legendary nature-lover Hazel Wolf was instrumental in getting the weekend started all those years ago, and she attended for decades until she passed away in the year 2000, at over 100 years old.

Big-Head Clover, with a flower nearly two inches across, is a lovely part of some sagebrush-steppe meadows

A beautiful meadow bordered by Trembling Aspens along the rutted and Beaver-flooded road to the campground (still, accessible to most cars)

Graceful shapes of slowly decaying sagebrush branches; especially artistic in black & white

In the photographs here you can get a sense of the natural environment and the creatures we saw during the long weekends (we have now attended for two years in a row). Don’t miss this experience next year!

Go to Wenas Audubon Campout for more information about these special weekends.

Western Bluebird male perched in Bitterbrush

Lazuli Bunting testing his lung power in a desert aria

Common Camas, a beautiful blue lily of wet meadows, was a staple food of Indians of the far west, who used the bulbs as a potato-like vegetable

With their elegant red bark contrasting with the green vegetation, the Ponderosa Pines of the Wenas Valley are the dominant large conifer

When the lighting is just right, the intensity of a male Mountain Bluebird’s feathers is extraordinary

An impressionistic view of balsamroot and buckwheat in a high meadow

Bitterbrush displays delicate yellow flowers in the spring

Townsend’s Solitaire in Bitterbrush

A graceful tapestry of Ponderosa Pine needles and branches photographed during our owl prowl

Eastern Kingbird perched on Bitterbrush

A brown cup fungus under the campground’s Ponderosa Pines

Black Canyon Trail through sagebrush-clad slopes

Female Mountain Bluebird examining the birders examining it

A Least Chipmunk feeding atop a fencepost

Pygmy Nuthatch emerging from its nest hole with a fecal sac (diaper) from one of its nestlings

In this dry country, wood weathers slowly and gracefully, as in this old fencepost end

Thompson’s Paintbrush is a creamy paintbrush common to the sagebrush-steppe

Chipping Sparrow singing his head off from atop a Bitterbrush branch

And now for something completely different: an abandoned truck among the Ponderosa Pines that has been on state land for at least two years along the road to a university sky observatory

Bullet holes and rust form a fanciful creature on the side of the blue truck

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

A fledgling Northern Saw-Whet Owl tries to sleep while I’m watching

In a willow thicket, a squat shape with a rusty color surprised my eyes. We were hoping to see owls, but this looked so SMALL compared with the Long-Eared Owls we had hoped to see. After photographing it for a time, which took a lot of pretzel contortions on the part of me and my tripod to get a graceful view through the willow branches, I worked with Karen and other hikers to identify the bird, which turned out to be a fledgling Northern Saw-Whet Owl–a fierce predator of mice and bugs, at least after Mommy and Daddy teach it to hunt.

After photographing the owl, I looked around for other fledglings in the Trembling Aspen grove surrounding an old settler’s cabin, and stumbled over (literally!) a fallen cottonwood log containing Oyster Mushrooms, which are a favorite with us (soaked in salt water to remove the white worms and black beetles–which should put off most people–then rinsed and fried in pure butter until the gills are browned and crispy. It is basically mushroom-flavored crunchy butter!). Karen gathered the mushrooms while I continued photographing the owl, which paid absolutely no attention to me.

After we finished these activities, we seached the aspen grove for more owls, to no avail. There was a group of backpackers camped at the cabin, which may have influenced where Momma and Papa Long-Ear told their babies to stay.

An old log cabin in an aspen grove

This was our third hiking trip into Black Canyon in the span of four years; we enjoy going back for the birding and wildflowers, which are so different from what we find at our rain forest home. The trail follows a steep old jeep road (now closed to vehicles) up into the canyon, which is a steep-sided gouge into Umtanum Ridge. Carved by a stream, the canyon consists of dramatic basalt formations poking out of slopes covered with wildflowers, Giant Sagebrush, Bitterbrush, and scattered Ponderosa Pines. The canyon bottom is lush with shrubs and trees where the stream and groundwater bathe the roots. The settler’s cabin, located a long mile above the trailhead, must have been a pleasant place to live, with abundant water and enough trees to build the cabin.

Hiking down the Black Canyon trail back to the trailhead

Wildlife is a key part of the experience here. A Golden Eagle soared above the canyon rim as we started the recent hike; a Loggerhead Shrike hunted from a branch as we ended our second hike. Karen surprised a rattlesnake hiding in the grass on our first hike. The aspens have vertical inscriptions left by Elk feeding on the inner bark. Vivid red-and-green Lewis’s Woodpeckers feed on the slopes. Coyotes travel the trail, leaving their sign. There are undoubtedly Cougars hunting among the rocks, probably watching us as we poke along.

The photographs here represent our three hikes into the canyon. If you go, be prepared for ticks and rattlesnakes. The land is owned by the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife; a parking pass is required for parking at the trailhead.

Three of the four fledgling Long-Eared Owls we observed on a prior trip into Black Canyon

Basalt formations protrude from the slope, which is blanketed with sagebrush-steppe vegetation

Loggerhead Shrike hunting in the rain. Years ago, during an Ontario winter, we observed where a shrike had stored mice for later use by impaling them on the namesake 1.5″ thorns of hawthorns. 

Fledgling Long-Eared Owl. This species often hides well in the trees by standing tall and thin–like a branch. They can be surprisingly hard to see when they do this.

Western Rattlesnake along the Black Canyon Trail, coiled and ready

Ponderosa Pines along the trail

For more information about the trail and how to drive to the trailhead, as well as recent trail reports, go to Washington Trails Association/Black Canyon

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

Walking through the Light Tunnel at Detroit Metro Airport

Detroit was my hometown. Don’t laugh: it was a great place to live in the ’50s and ’60s. I grew up listening to Motown on the radio and saw Bob Seger live at the local teen center years before his mid-1970s success. We had the Cranbrook Institute of Science for cultural visits, and one of the best metropolitan park systems in the world. My suburban school gave me a wonderful college prep education. The Great Lakes provided summer fun, and “up north” beckoned with wonderful adventures. Many families owned cottages on lakes and rivers in this land of lakes. My Dad was an engineer at GM, and many of the neighborhood men in our leafy suburb also worked for the Big 3. It was a lively place to grow up, with the kinetic energy of the postwar boom driving an economy that had its pedal to the floor.

I remember my Dad coming home one evening, eagerly sketching out the tail fins he had just seen the designers produce for the brand new 1959 Chevy Impala. We had a new Chevy or Pontiac in the driveway every year, and the auto industry seemed like the pulsing heartbeat of America. The Corvette, Ford Mustang, Plymouth Barracuda, and Chevy Camero were the muscle cars that all the young guys lusted after. Cruising Woodward Avenue was the thing to do on warm weekend nights.

Alas, whoever was driving Detroit’s economy applied the brakes. Hard. Early signs of trouble came with the racial tensions between blacks and whites during a decade of discontent, culminating in a major riot (which some might justifiably call an uprising) during the long, hot summer of 1967. Fires and fights raged all over the city, with the National Guard and 82nd Airborne called in to restore order. The racial divide has continued, with 8 Mile Road dividing mostly black Detroit from the mostly white northern suburbs. Hip hop artist Eminem famously referenced this road and divide in his music.

Next came the ’70s, with oil shocks and the early popularity of imports giving Detroit a two-punch warning of the beating to come. As oil uncertainties continued, the baby boomers decided that cars from America’s prior enemies were cooler to drive than Detroit muscle, which had, in any event, been tamed by new mileage standards. Jobs were starting to evaporate with cost-cutting, oursourcing, and sharing the sales with the Japanese; guys with high school educations had trouble getting good union assembly line jobs like their dads had held before them.

Whites had been abandoning the city for decades by now, and the Motor City began depopulating as opportunities dried up and the twin thugs of crime and misery held the city hostage. The road down was long and potholed, and today much of Detroit is barren of houses and business, and there is talk of farming what used to be residential neighborhoods. The story of Detroit is like a story of Armageddon, with a once-rich civilization fallen into ruins. It makes me think of Cormac McCarthy’s terrifying book, The Road.

There is no point in trying to blame anyone or any single event for the devastation of Detroit; it is what it is. All we can do is look to the future.

Which is what I did on this brief trip to the McNamara Terminal of Detroit Metro Airport. This terminal is my favorite of any airport I’ve ever been to, with a great fountain, an overhead tram, and some nostalgic shops and restaurants that celebrate the Motor City. Another point in this terminal’s favor is that my brother helped build it, including installing moving sidewalks.

The best part of a visit to McNamara Terminal is walking through the Light Tunnel, an underground walkway connecting Concourse A with Concourses B & C. The Light Tunnel, designed by Mills James Productions and featuring glass art by Foxfire Glass Works and a musical composition by Victor Alexeeff, is an experience to reawaken your sense of wonder for flying, with ever-changing LED lights behind long cast glass panels. Rather than describe it, I’ll let the pictures paint a visual impression of walking through the airport. There are moving sidewalks on each side of the tunnel, with a wide promenade for walking between the concourses. I took most of the pictures from the moving sidewalks, which kept me occupied for at least half-an-hour while waiting for my plane. Great fun!

A montage of images of the ever-changing light show

Mother and child and Boeing 747, through the lively fountain

The beautiful fountain, created by WET Design, uses laminar flow of water in ever-changing patterns; it took inspiration from the flight maps that show the curving routes of airplanes as they travel from city to city around the curve of the earth

A view showing the long Light Tunnel

Detail of lovely cast glass backlit by LED lights in the Light Tunnel

A camera’s proof that aliens live among us

If your travels take you to or through Detroit on Delta, don’t miss the Light Tunnel!

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

I first heard of Mendocino two years after the Summer of Love brought tens of thousands of hippies to San Francisco. In the spring of 1969 I drove west from Michigan in a bright red Opal; I was heading to California for a summer of fighting forest fires. At a campground in Nevada, a friendly fellow camper came up to me and told me all about how he had “dropped out” of society and was currently part of a small theater troupe in Mendocino–a place I had never heard of. He had a hippie van and long hair, and I asked him if he regretted dropping out. He said “Lord no!” and seemed amazed that I would ask the question.

Two years later, my wife-to-be and I went to see a movie in Ann Arbor, where we were in college. The Summer of ’42, a sad and romantic tale about a young woman who lost her sailor husband in World War II, had a character even more beautiful than the star, Jennifer O’Neill, and that was the lovely village of

Rustic fences and open meadows characterize the bluffs here

Mendocino. Perched on cliffs above the blue Pacific, with flowery meadows, weathered picket fences, and lovely old wooden homes, the town seemed like the perfect American village–the kind of small town we admire in our collective imagination.

During the summer of 1973, my young wife and I went to California, where we spent a five month summer camped under soaring Douglas Firs, with me fighting forest fires for the U.S. Forest Service. During some days off, we took a trip to Mendocino and had a chance to experience this lovely village first-hand. We didn’t realize it until then, but Mendocino had been something of an artists’ colony since the 1950s, and I remember buying a piece of earthy stoneware that was innovative for the time. There was also a bookstore that had lots of wonderful do-it-yourself manuals inspired by the contents of the Whole Earth Catalog, which was the closest thing to the internet that we had back then. I remember leafing through some books about building your own house, but realizing that I didn’t have any talents for building a house. But plenty of hippies of the time did, and ramshackle houses sprouted along with marijuana crops back among the Redwood groves in the endless ridges and steep valleys of the Klamath Mountains. Those remote wildlands became one of the eminent pot-growing regions of North America, for better or worse. As we drove through the area, I recall singing lyrics from a Gordon Lightfoot song about the footloose wanderers of that era: “If you’re drivin’ east to Reno, or north to Mendocino, I hope you find your rainbow’s end …” (from the 1971 song Cabaret).

I returned to Mendocino while attending college in Utah during 1975. An “Animal Communities” class I was taking, taught by esteemed ecologist Dr. James MacMahon, did transects (straight lines where a biologist records data on plant and animals observed) recording animal life from the shore and out

The beautiful rocks of Mendocino Headlands State Park

into the ocean, so that those of us living in the mountains of Utah could have a sense of the structure of an entirely different kind of animal community. It was fun to see an octopus and sea stars and all the other varied tidepool life. The rocky beaches of Mendocino are incredibly fecund; naturalists can see Gray Whales migrating offshore; Harbor Seals and California Sea Lions basking on rocks; seabirds nesting on the offshore rocks; and all the wonderful invertebrates that occupy the tidepools. I recall driving through town, and it didn’t look like much had changed.

By the late ’80s, established in a career in Upstate New York, I was a long way from Mendocino, but once in a while the little village would show up unexpectedly in the media. Murder, She Wrote was the prime example. Set in Cabot Cove, Maine, the mystery series starring Angela Lansbury was actually filmed on the left coast, featuring Mendocino as the fictional Cabot Cove. Since Mendocino was founded by New Englanders, it had that look and feel. Residents of the little town enjoyed the occasional on location filming visits from Ms. Lansbury and Tom Bosley, and sometimes locals were hired as extras for the series. One home that is currently a bed-and-breakfast, Blair House, became Jessica Fletcher’s home in the series.

By the early 1990s, I had switched careers and became a photographer. My photographic travels took me to Mendocino one spring circa 1992, where I was enchanted once again by the early American coastal architecture. By the early

The village is perched on a headland terrace above the Pacific Ocean

1990s, yuppies had displaced hippies, and the town had a different feel. Art galleries were marketing more to people with money, and the gallery scene was big in town. The VW bus I was driving seemed like an anachronism in a place now dominated by Lexus and BMW cars drivien by the tourists. I wandered around town with camera and tripod, thinking again what a lovely place this would be to live if I could afford it, which I couldn’t.

A flowery path and a water tower among the Victorian homes

Nearly 20 years then went by in the blink of an eye, until I next had an opportunity to visit Mendocino. My old VW van had burned in a highway fire years ago, and my hair was grayer and shorter, but I still liked the look of the town–which has remained almost identical through all these years thanks to the officially designated Mendocino and Headlands Historic District, which carefully limits what owners can do with their property. In those 20 years, the shops that went from hippie to yuppie had now transformed again. The art galleries were fewer, having been displaced by nail and hair salons, an organic coffee shop, and more higher-end clothing boutiques and jewelry shops–all representing what I’ll call the “California Me” style, in which personal indulgence has become the accepted norm. There are undoubtedly hippies still out in the woods growing pot, and I’m sure that high-tech and banker yuppies

Classic Victorian details and a rustic water tower

who made fortunes during the bubble eras have second homes in the area, but the typical tourist these days is someone with the personal funds to enjoy a lovely bed-and-breakfast, and spend the days visiting wineries and brew-pubs, shopping in boutiques, and enjoying other indulgences. Once again times had changed.

And times will continue to change. I’ll probably return to Mendocino in a decade or so, if I am lucky. What changes in American and Californian society can I expect to see on that next visit? More gray-haired people? Undoubtedly; after all, that is the trajectory of my baby boom cohort. A new dominance of electric cars? A sudden influx of craft whiskey and vodka distillers?  Vast lavender farms to equal those of Provence? State sales of the headlands to developers in order to raise money for California’s beleaguered government? Hopefully not the latter …

Times change; fashions come and go; and some of these changes are reflected in this remote, offbeat village. Fortunately, the look and feel of Mendocino has remained relatively unchanged in the whirlwind of bigger changes that blow through American life. The unchanged look of this charming little village perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean is an anchor in the storm of change sweeping America.

Calla Lilies along a picket fence in this quaint village

Main Street in Mendocino is a collection of cute shops

A beautiful home, undoubtedly occupied for over a century

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

I heard fragments of the legend of Glass Beach from several people, who told me about it after seeing my photographs of beach stones. As they told it, there had been a glass manufacturing plant on the Pacific Ocean bluffs of Fort Bragg, California. As time went by, evidence of the plant had been erased, leaving only the broken shards of glass washing in and out, in and out, steadily being ground by the raging surf.

I found Glass Beach during a recent trip to Fort Bragg and Mendocino. It is a stunningly beautiful wild beach, with rocky bluffs and a gravel beach. Lots of people visit the beach, often with containers to (illegally) pick up and cart away some of the beautiful glass fragments.  I hiked the short trail to the

The stunningly beautiful Glass Beach in Fort Bragg

beach, and immediately found thousands of beautiful shards of glass among the stones on the beach, in colors ranging from Budweiser brown to Seven-Up green to Vicks blue. Most of them were in really tiny fragments, since a lot of years have gone by since the legend of the abandoned glass plant began.

Actually, the truth is out there, and there was no glass plant. The truth was that the people of Fort Bragg used this beautiful ocean cliff as an informal

Tiny shards of glass polished by the waves and sand of Glass Beach

dump, discarding old washing machines and tires and cars and whatever else they didn’t want to pay to have hauled away–including lots and lots of glass bottles. The dump was closed in the mid-1960s, and cleanups brought the beach back to nearly pristine condition. Except, of course, for the fragments of glass that were too small to pick up.  Now those pieces of glass are steadily being reclaimed by the ocean, gradually turning into colorful grains of sand.

Glass Beach is now preserved as part of MacKerricher State Park.

Blue glass pieces were rare and tiny

Wet glass along Glass Beach

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

Avalanche danger was in the orange to red zone–a high probability of snowy terror and a warning to watch for unattended snowpacks and to be prepared to take action if there were suddenly loud sounds. Terror indeed!

Still, it had been a long winter, with a lot of dangerous weekends in the mountains. We had the special kind of cabin fever that comes only from months of rainy winter Puget Sound weather, when we either turn into lethargic slugs or go screaming madly into the rain.

Weather forecasters back in early autumn predicted a La Niña winter, which would bring colder and wetter conditions to the Pacific Northwest.  Nature obliged. Our rain gauge for 2011, so far, was over 20 inches and the snowpack in the mountains was getting thicker by the day. The problem was that there had been alternate patterns of sun, rain, and extreme cold in the mountains, which caused the layers of the snowpack to be unstable (think of a layer cake with the top layer, lubricated by a thin layer of Cool Whip and Jello, avalanching onto the floor in a ’60s sitcom). The avalanche danger everywhere in the mountains was extremely high, weekend after weekend.

We finally decided to head for Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park, avalanche danger be damned! Hurricane Ridge is known for treacherous weather and deep snow, so we checked out the forecast, the webcam, and the avalanche danger web sites, and decided that we would be OK if we were careful. The drive to the ridge is about 140 miles from our home, so we left early in the morning, carrying tire chains and extra food and warm clothing.

There was no snow in Port Angeles, gateway to the Olympics, but as we headed up the road, we encountered the first snowbanks and it gradually got thicker as we rose in elevation. Finally, we turned the corner onto Hurricane

Rime ice on the subalpine trees, viewed through icicles on the Hurricane Ridge Visitor Center 

Ridge, and saw what we had specifically hoped to see: rime ice coating all the conifer trees, making each tree look like it had been created in a fantasy workshop.

Our northwestern conifers are adapted to winters where the accumulated snow seemingly gets as hard and heavy as concrete. The shape of our subalpine firs and spruces, for example, is tall and slender. Longer branches would break off in the heavy snow, so these species have short branches.

Rime ice is a special kind of ice that forms at windy, high elevations. Water droplets in the atmosphere, at temperatures between -4 and +14°F, become supercooled, staying in liquid form until hurtled against an object. Upon striking that object, the supercooled water suddenly freezes solid. The result?  Danger, in the case of an airplane.  Beauty, in the case of a subalpine forest.

Rime ice on a weather and radio station; note how the ice crystals grow in straight lines out from the metal of the structure and into the prevailing winds

We had never examined rime ice close up before, and we found that it has a distinct pattern. It grows outward from say, a branch, in a long structure that resembles an opaque crystal (I’m not sure if it technically would be considered a crystal). These linear structures can be over a foot long, and face into the wind. As long as the wind carries supercooled water and as long as the wind comes from the same direction, the formations grow outward in a straight line.

Yet rime ice is not soft like snow, despite its fantasyland appearance. It is hard to the touch; when we tapped it with ski poles, it made a rapping sound rather than collapsing like snow would do. And rime ice only occurred at the places along the ridge where wind would funnel. In the forest just below the open ridge, there was no rime ice (and little snow) on the trees. Interesting stuff indeed!

Looking downslope from Hurricane Ridge: the higher trees are entirely coated with rime ice, while the slightly lower trees have much less ice

Karen and I snowshoed through the rime ice forest along the ridge, taking care to avoid cornices at the tops of cliffs and to avoid steep, avalanche-prone slopes. All the alpine skiers, cross-country skiers, snowshoers, and even a woman in high heels were having a good time on Hurricane Ridge. Well, except, perhaps, for the woman coming down off the slope borne by a snowmobile, whose leg was in a splint.  Perhaps she later sought help from Dr. Gouge, an orthopaedic surgeon from Port Angeles who had a sign advertising his services on the side of a van parked at Hurricane Ridge.

The snow depth gauge on Hurricane Ridge measured 14 feet of snow

Olympic National Park is among the few national parks with an alpine ski area; a rope tow leads to the ridge

Note the record snowfall and the accumulated snow this winter (much more has fallen since)

Snow level rising on the windows of the Visitor Center

Tall, thin conifers are the rule here; a tree with a lot of wide branches would pick up too heavy a snow load, and branches would break

Karen Rentz snowshoeing into the rime ice forest

Rime ice coated the structure of this walkway window outside the Visitor Center

Another view showing thick accumulation of rime ice

Young men marveling at and photographing the rime ice

Looking north from Hurricane Ridge toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Vancouver Island in the distance

Wave shape of a cornice atop a cliff on Hurricane Ridge

A pair of conifers covered with ice

Lone tree coated with ice; with a view of the Olympic Range

Cauliflower trees

For more information about Olympic National Park, go to:  http://www.nps.gov/Olym/index.htm

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

I came to the Washington Park Arboretum to photograph colorful garden flowers; alas, spring seems to be a bit late this year, so I spent most of my early March afternoon photographing wild visitors to the park.

Today was a birdy day, with a knot of half-a-dozen Ruby-Crowned Kinglets, a Golden-Crowned Kinglet, a Brown Creeper, and lots of Black-Capped Chickadees.  Robins were doing unmentionable things deep in a flowering forsythia. A pair of Gadwalls fed on a tiny pond and didn’t seem to mind that strange photographer laying on the ground and pointing a lens at them.

Ruby-Crowned Kinglet, a tiny bird constantly in motion, pauses a split second for a portrait

Mosses were lush and feathery to the touch on this spring day. A few people were happily walking dogs, jogging, identifying birds, and taking pictures. As a counterpoint, in thick brush I happened upon a grief-stricken informal memorial to a child from an anguished parent. It reminded me of a passage from a Dave Mathews song:

“Lying in the park on a beautiful day

Sunshine in the grass, and the children play

Sirens passing, fire engine red

Someone’s house is burning down on a day like this”

The good and bad, happy and sad, swirl around us in a cloud of molecules and electrical impulses every day as we go about our lives.

A parent’s sad memorial to a son. Among other touching words, the driftwood sticks are inscribed “In Memory: My son and best friend … You beat us there, but we’ll meet you there … We love you.”

Woman walking with her dog on a beautiful spring day

Indian Plum (Oemleria cerasiformis), a native shrub, lights up the March woods with its candle-like flowers

Extreme closeup of beautiful moss; I have never had training in moss identification, so I don’t have a clue as to the species

The graceful base of a huge old rhododendron

Water play, or so it looked to me

Female swimming among beautiful reflections

Adult female Gadwall with an orange bill. The female was more actively feeding than the male–within about four feet of me at times. She would sit in one place on the water, vigorously “paddling” downward with her legs, causing her to rock rapidly back and forth. Then she would “tip up” to feed, with tail stuck into the air. I believe her rapid leg motion helped to stir up matted aquatic plants so that she could more easily harvest them when she stuck her head underwater, but it is also possible that she was after aquatic insects. The male Gadwall kept a wary eye on me as I watched the female feeding.

I had always thought of male Gadwalls as rather plain ducks–especially in comparison to Wood Ducks–but the barred feathers have an understated elegance of design up close

The shape of a Gadwall’s head is interesting, with the fat cheeks and narrow head

In case you hadn’t guessed, I love photographing ducks from a low angle, though it gets increasingly difficult to haul myself up from the cramped position when I’m finished

Beautiful and subtle colors and patterns adorn the male in breeding plumage

Cone and needles of a Weeping White Pine (Pinus strobus ‘Pendula’)

A male Ruby-Crowned Kinglet showing a bit of its scarlet crest, which is often hidden

Turkey Tail Fungus (Trametes versicolor) growing on a fallen log

Patch of moss growing on the bark of a fallen log

I have posted several previous blogs about the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle.  Go to:

Azaleas in Seattle, Pretty in Pink, Spring in Seattle, and Monet in Seattle’s Arboretum.

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com. I also have some inexpensive, smaller pieces for sale at an Etsy Website.

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website.

Alpenglow on the tip of Mt. Shuksan, high in the North Cascades

Deep twilight came early high on the slopes. Karen and I had just finished photographing alpenglow on the high peaks and sky surrounding the Mt. Baker Ski Area, and had strapped on our headlamps in anticipation of the darkness we would encounter as we descended the slopes from Artist Point.

“Have you seen my Dad?”, asked a teenage girl who snowshoed up behind me. I replied that I hadn’t, and she said she had planned to meet up with him after they had taken different routes in the mountains. She, with youthful energy, had ascended a steep slope to see what was on the other side; he, with less energy, agreed that she could go alone if she agreed to meet back at the base of the slope. Well, time went by and it was soon getting dark, and she was still high above their proposed meeting place.

I asked her if she would come with us, since we were heading back to the same parking area, and she agreed. She didn’t have a headlamp, or car keys, or the necessary emergency supplies should she be stuck in the mountains after dark. We stopped and asked several groups if they had seen a man looking for his teenage daughter, but nobody had; we asked them that if they did encounter him to let him know that she was heading back to the parking area. She also called out, in case her father could hear her, but he didn’t. She didn’t have a cell phone, so I lent her my iPhone and she twice tried to call her dad, but his phone was switched off (AT&T actually has a great signal at the Mt. Baker Ski Area).

We switched on our headlamps and eventually made it to the parking area. I asked the girl to ask people in the parking lot if they had seen her dad, while I went to get our car (we told the girl that we would stay with her, in a warm car, as long as necessary).

Just before I got back with the car, the girl’s father appeared at the parking lot, clearly upset with and worried about his daughter.

It had a good resolution, but what would have been the next steps if the father had not shown up?  It turned out that the truck camper where the girl first asked if someone had seen her father was the overnight camp for a ski patrol member. He said that if the father hadn’t shown up soon, they would have quickly mounted a ski patrol search for him, including people on skis and snowmobiles. They probably would have found him quickly, but you never know.

Moral of the story?  Stuff happens in the mountains, despite best intentions. It is always good to “Be Prepared!”, as the Boy Scout motto of my youth always commanded.  When in the mountains, have a headlamp, firemaking ability, extra warmth, food, and a plan. Always. Which reminds me, I’d better add some matches to my pack …

There is a warning sign at the parking lot that is intended to scare the daylights out of winter travelers. It warns people of avalanches and cliffs, and ends by saying “You or your heirs will be charged for any rescue a minimum of : $500.  RESCUE MAY NOT BE POSSIBLE.” Good point.

Hey, this means you!

Okay, enough of the gloom. There was also a human story of joy. While snowshoeing at Artist Point, we came upon a young couple who asked me to take their picture with Mt. Shuksan in the background. I did, and the photo looked great on the LCD screen.  Then the young woman said that they had just become engaged to be married. I asked when they had become engaged, and she said “Just now!”  So we were the first to hear the happy news.  Artist Point, one of the most beautiful viewpoints in North America, was a lovely place to pop the question. On the other hand, had she said no, it would have been a long trudge back to the car.  We told them that we have now been married for 38 years and wished them well.

Okay, now that I’ve spent all my time talking about our human encounters, perhaps I should spend a moment talking about the wild nature we encountered. Actually, maybe I’ll just let the photographs speak to that. Suffice it to say that it was really cold and really windy, and we were glad to be wearing our red Antarctica parkas.

Graceful snowboard tracks descend Mt. Herman

It was simply amazing how winter sports have changed in the last two decades.  There were hundreds of snowshoers and almost no cross-country skiers, and a good share of the snowshoers were wearing little plastic MSR snowshoes that seemed to work really well. Snowboarders have taken to the incredibly steep backcountry slopes in huge numbers. Everywhere there was a 70% slope, boarders had carved graceful sloloms down the expanses of snow. I admire these fearless young boarders, especially now that I am at an age when I can break an ankle while stepping off a curb. There were also lots of winter campers; I counted 18 tents in several areas, and other people were digging snow caves like winter Hobbits.

Winter camping in the basin below Mt. Herman

It was great to see so many people enjoying the outdoors, getting away from their Facebook, Tweeting, (and blogs!) for a day.

Snow blowing on a wind train straight from the Arctic

This is me snowshoeing at Artist Point (photo by Karen Rentz)

Blowing snow on the lower flanks of Mt. Shuksan

In these snow conditions, a snowshoer would compress the snow, making it denser. Then the wind would come in and scour the loose snow around the compressed snowshoe track, leaving a raised imprint of the snowshoes.

Rime ice covered all the trees at the highest elevations

Look carefully at this precipitous slope to see the snowboard track leading down the mountain; these snowboarders have a healthy dose of crazy courage!

Sun star and beautiful blue shadows

Karen Rentz snowshoeing with Table Mountain distant

A group of snowshoers descending from Artist Point

Conifers and rime ice on the lower slopes of Table Mountain

Blowing snow on the lower flanks of Mt. Shuksan

Steam from a volcanic vent on Mt. Baker catching the last rays of sun

The summit pyramid of Mt. Shuksan at  day’s end. This mountain’s sculpturing was done by glaciers, not volcanic action.

Alpenglow turns the sky into otherworldly shades of purple and blue after the sun has set

For further information about the Mt. Baker area in winter, go to:

Mt. Baker Ski Area

Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com. I also have some inexpensive, smaller pieces for sale at an Etsy Website.

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website.

Gardens welcome us by delighting our senses, and often by distilling some of the best aspects of nature into a small space. On my late October visit to Seattle’s Japanese Garden, in the Washington Park Arboretum, I enjoyed peak autumn colors on a clear, sunny day.

Formal gardens are not my usual subject; my tastes usually run to the random and ragged aspects of wild nature. Yet, when I photograph wild nature, I search out a kind of simplified essence of nature, and isn’t that exactly what a Japanese garden is?  So I easily slipped into my role as nature photographer and came away with a lot of colorful work in an afternoon.

The photographs presented here occurred when I was channeling Claude Monet; the water lilies and autumn reflections made for some impressionistic photography, and I felt like I was immersed in Monet’s garden at Giverny.

A graceful blending of autumn color and pale leaves

Koi with an almost radioactive orange color

Lily pads and autumn reflections

Japanese maple with pleasing bokeh–a term American photographers adapted from Japan to describe the quality of the out-of-focus areas behind the main subject. By using a shallow depth-of-field with a lens known to be good for its bokeh effect, a photographer can create a composition that soothes the eye.

A cacophony of color and design in the Japanese Garden’s pond

Straight from Monet’s sketchbook

Layers of color and texture

I have posted several previous blogs about the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle.  Go to:

Azaleas in Seattle, Pretty in Pink, and Spring in Seattle.

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com. I also have some inexpensive, smaller pieces for sale at an Etsy Website.

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website.

What are the chances of seeing a Gray Wolf while hiking the Gray Wolf Trail? Zip, actually. Wolves once roamed the Olympic Mountains, but every last one was hunted down and exterminated early in the last century; leaving just the romantic name, Gray Wolf River. Perhaps someday Gray Wolves will be reintroduced, but the last time that notion was floated, in the early 90s, posses of yahoos showed up at the public hearings and catcalled and ridiculed the public officials who proposed it. Threats were made and the project quietly disappeared. The yahoos won. Maybe next time it will turn out better … or not.

This isn’t the prettiest of trails. It starts by following a decommissioned logging road that is quietly returning to some semblance of nature, though it is still bumpy with dozer piles and gouges, then enters the Buckhorn Wilderness and descends through the forest to the river. Near the river, a windstorm raged through the forest sometime in the last decades, knocking down hundreds of trees and making the woods look like the old childhood game of Pick-up Sticks. Except Bigfoot decided not to play and left the sticks for the trail crew to chew through.

The river itself has been on a tear in recent years. It ripped out a high bridge during an Olympic-level deluge some years ago, which blocked a trail to the high country. And even in the last month, it tore out a section of trail during a rainstorm that brought eight inches of rain to our home near the Olympics.

During the last big rainstorm, the river rose and tore these trees from the riverbank; note the torn up roots and gouged bark

This river, like all the torrents that flow down from the high Olympics, chews away at its banks, as if it hates to color within the lines. Outside the lines, it piles rocks and topples streambank trees before making a temporary retreat. When the riverbed fills with stones and gravel, the water will suddenly dash off through the forest and cut its own new path. Fortunately, this happens rarely in human time; but in geologic time the river travels down out of the mountains like a writhing snake, back and forth across the basin.

Most of the trees in the river basin were relatively young, or had been knocked down. We saw several immense Western Hemlocks that have long stood defiantly against the river, and are now centuries old. As with all the rainy forests in our dank part of the globe, mosses and lichens and fungi and ferns thrive everywhere. Look closely, and the forest floor can look as if aliens landed and are oozing through the wet landscape. Speaking of oozing, this is also the land of giant slugs, though it was too cold for them to be sliming through the forest during our hike.

The Bird’s Nest Fungus is one of the stranger life forms in the forest. The little “eggs” in the cup are containers for spores; these eggs leap out of the nest when hit by a raindrop falling at just the right angle. This sends the eggs flying through the air, each attached to a little rope, and when the rope strikes a twig, the attached egg is carried ’round and ’round the twig like a tetherball. It sits there, waiting for the weather to dry out. When the sun comes out, the eggs break open and the spores are released to the wind. There is even a technical name for this method of spreading spores; the “nests” are known as splash cups. How’s that for a bedtime story!

The streams here are home to a terrible predator, at least if one is small. The Pacific Giant Salamander grows up to a foot long. In his excellent book, Cascade-Olympic Natural History, Daniel Mathews says “In small mountain streams it is the dominant predator, outweighing all salmon and trout put together.” And I bet it doesn’t taste as good. Unfortunately, we’ve never seen one, but it would be a great candidate for my museum Hall of Weird Olympic Life Forms.

Some of the eggs splashed outside the nest but didn’t wander far from home

While walking the trail, I had an inkling that this would be the day we would finally see a Cougar. Alas, if one was there, it was a silent sentinel, quietly watching from the mysterious forest. Two weeks ago, a Cougar was seen several blocks from our home on Fawn Lake, but we missed that one. Someday, we’ll see one, when we least expect it …

The soothing mists floating through the tall trees of Olympic National Forest, viewed from the Gray Wolf Trail

I spent a lot of time photographing small stuff on the ground, as well as the trees. I even wrenched my leg when I was perched on two fallen logs with my tripod, trying to get a good angle on a mossy tree. My left foot broke through a rotten log, toppling me and my tripod like a fat hemlock slammed down by fierce winds coming off the Pacific. I thought my stump was splintered, based on the immediate pain. But the pain subsided and I climbed back up on the log again and got the photo (though the leg hurts too much to go jogging this week). Karen was getting cold while waiting for me, and it was getting late, so we walked up out of the river basin and into the clouds, arriving back at the trailhead at 4:45 p.m.

This Western Red Cedar, draped in epiphytic mosses, was my visual target when I collapsed suddenly into a rotten log, then toppled to the ground. I think the trees were making me feel what they feel when the chain saws snarl.

A tiny trail leads into the forest so that we can worship at the base of the tallest trees like the Druids we are

This dead cedar has endured fire, as evidenced by the hollowed out center and extensive black charcoal; perhaps it was hit by lightning long ago, or perhaps a wildfire raged through this forest

Playing Pick-up Sticks with Bigfoot

Another REALLY weird life form: the Fairy Barf lichen, which looks like little blown chunks against a bile green background

Mosses in bewildering diversity drape logs and rocks throughout the forest

Here the famished Gray Wolf River devoured a stretch of the trail

Red Alders thrive along the start of the trail, where clearcuts removed the ancient, original forest several decades ago

Still another really weird life form: Witches’ Butter. This gelatinous fungus appears after rain, which could be any ol’ time in the Olympics. Witches’ Butter has a slimy texture and some claim it is edible, but tasteless. Perhaps it appeals to witches, along with fly wings and salamander gills. By the way, the vertical line in the photograph was made by a beetle tunneling under the bark, devouring wood.

Sword Ferns thrive in the damp Olympic forests

Red Alders in the moist air of the Olympic highlands

For more information about Olympic National Forest, go to the Olympic National Forest website

To read some of my prior stories from Olympic National Forest, go to:

Harlequin Ducks, Sol Duc, and Tubal Cain

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

Huge snowflakes drift down from the inky sky, as if in a hazy dream, deep in the ocean at night, in a cloud of tiny, luminescent jellyfish. So much snow, an inch an hour, with school closures likely tomorrow. The snow reminds me of driving through an upstate New York blizzard on the way home from a New Year’s Eve party years ago, with snow so thick that I had to hold open the car door while driving to see the edge of the road. That night, a honking big upstate snow plow was in the ditch; we stopped our little Chevy to offer help, but he had a two-way radio.  Somehow we made it home, and the next morning I used our huge snowblower to clear the driveway and give my face a frosty beard.

A stairway into an enchanted evening

The place we live now–near sea level in the Puget Sound region of Washington State–doesn’t get much snow. Our winters are generally long, dark, and rainy. But once in a while we get a snowstorm, as was the case this week, when we got about six inches of heavy snow in an evening. It was a classic snowfall, with wondrous trillions of flakes falling fast and thick. Just the night to try out my favorite new photography technique on snow around my home.

Snowflakes illuminated by electronic flash on the camera; with a bit of orange light contributed by a high-pressure sodium streetlight

This technique is simple, and involves using an electronic flash on the camera.  I used a tripod and a high ISO and a powerful flash, and incorporated various street lights around the house to give a bit of color to some of the scenes.  These photographs are the result, and I think they show the everyday scenes around my house in a magical new way.  One of the aspects of photography that I have always loved is its ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

An old bicycle in front of a massive cedar in my garden

Snow falling on a Western Red Cedar

Snowfall along the road near my home

The heavy, wet snow clings to every branch of the maples and alders

The high-pressure sodium light of the streetlamp adds interesting color to the nightscape

Photographing up into the night sky, with countless billions or trillions of snowflakes drifting toward earth

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com.

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website.

For another view of the landscape at night, go to my weblog:  Yoho National Park at Night.

Imagine rural America as it was in the late autumn of 1875. Horse-drawn buggies pass by, the drivers greeting passers-by with a wave. Children play in the snow outside a one-room schoolhouse. Farmers are out on the pond, cutting ice to put away for the distant summer. Eggs and quilts are for sale at a roadside farm. Men pitch in to build a new house for one that burned down …

Except it is not 1875: it is 2010, in a pastoral landscape in central Michigan where scores of Amish farms and families have established a community during the past 25 years. This is the area where my mother lives, though she is not Amish. I remember when the first families arrived and bought some old and tired farms; my mother was talking to a man who had experienced the Amish arriving in other areas, and he said something to the effect of “You are going to experience a wonderful renaissance here, as the Amish bring the worn-out soil back to life.” He was right, and I’ve watched through the years as the numbers of Amish rose and the landscape came back to life.

My photographs here were all taken on several brief late autumn and early winter drives through the Amish landscape, so they comprise just a snapshot of a different way of life. I wish I could spend time getting to know these people, but I live half a continent away and it isn’t easy to strike up a conversation between buggy and Buick.

While there, I watched three different Amish wagons, drawn by draft horses, coming across the fields from unseen ponds, each carrying a shiny load of freshly cut ice. The blocks of ice were perhaps 8″ thick, reflecting a long and cold December, and they had the slight blue-green tint hinting at their pond origin. I watched one pair of men putting the blocks into an insulated shed using big, steel ice tongs.

This brings me back to a childhood memory of my family buying ice during a circa 1960 camping trip in the Upper Peninsula. Along the waterfront in Copper Harbor, on the Keweenaw Peninsula which juts jauntily into Lake Superior, there was an old-timer selling his ice from an insulated shed. He hauled it out with tongs, and rinsed off the insulating layer of sawdust by dunking the block in a galvanized tub of lake water. My dad then put the block in our green Coleman ice chest to take back to the campground at Fort Wilkins State Park. That kind of experience has pretty much vanished in 21st century America.

Stacks of cornstalks enduring a November snowstorm

When I toured the Amish landscape on a Monday, nearly every farmer’s wife had set out her wash to dry in the sub-freezing winds. Some had lines strung up on the farmhouse porch; others had lines in the yard, where blue denim overalls shared the breeze with colorful quilts.

Signs in front of the old white farmhouses proclaim what is for sale, usually with the disclaimer “No Sunday Sales.” Some will be selling brown eggs and honey; others might have quilts or deer blinds or maple syrup or freshly-baked pies. The families make plenty of time for these enterprises; after all, there aren’t umpteen hours of television per day, or 300 tweets per day, or email, or shopping for the latest fashions. These people live off the electric grid. In fact, should catastrophe hit America, we will be looking to the Amish to see what we can emulate from their self-sufficient way of life.

While driving one gravel road, I came upon a big wagon with two draft horses parked in one lane of the narrow road. Two Amish men were cutting firewood from roadside trees and loading it on the wagon. Their dog sat looking at me

A cow grazes among the cornstalks of an Amish farm, cleaning up the cornfield and fertilizing it at the same time; the red barn in the distance is probably not Amish unless recently acquired, since the Amish paint their barns white

from the other lane, blocking it, so I waited patiently for one of the men to see why I was parked there. He realized that the dog was in the way and called it. He laughed; I laughed; and we had a moment of human connection.

I saw three one-room schoolhouses in the area. Through the windows of one, I could see children praying. Later, I saw about ten children, clad entirely in black, playing in the white snow during recess outside another schoolhouse. Amish children clearly enjoy their snowball fights!

An Amish one-room schoolhouse after the children have left for the day

Had it been late spring, I would have seen the Amish children walking to school in their traditional clothes, complete with straw hats. Amish men also wear straw hats, and Amish women wear long dresses, even while working in their beautiful gardens. The ladies wear hair coverings in the summer and black bonnets in the winter. Many Amish go barefoot in warm weather.

On this trip I saw the spread of sawmills among the Amish–at least a half-dozen farms had associated sawmills. This is a good fit for the Amish, because many of the farms have woodlots where the farmers can take a sustainable harvest of hardwood oaks and maples. One woodlot was set up as a sugarbush, where each March the farmer would tap the Sugar Maples, collect the sap, and boil off the excess water to make one of the most flavorful products on earth–maple syrup.

As I sit here at my computer typing this story, I realize one of the aspects of Amish life that I envy: the Amish men spend their lives outdoors doing hard physical work. They plow fields, stack corn, milk cows, split firewood, and accomplish all the other necessary chores around a farm. These men stay in great shape from their work, while I have to jog mindlessly along a road or work out on a fitness machine as a necessary counterpoint to my digital life. I wouldn’t trade my life for theirs … or would I? Probably not.

Amish farmers stack their cornstalks in the field in this distinctive manner, creating a series of pyramids through the cornfield

The Amish life would work for many, but for me the rules of the religion would be something of a straightjacket. Creative expression does not often blend well with fundamentalism.  So here I am, living an imperfect life, but one that allows me as much flexibility and creativity as I can muster. And there they are, living satisfying lives in the shelter of a like-minded community. We are essentially different, and I love this diversity of lives that America encourages.

Horses are a daily part of Amish life; they plow the fields and pull the buggies and assist in much of the other work around these farms that harken back to an earlier time

Stacks of cornstalks after a snowstorm

Amish horses grazing in a cornfield

Buggies share the road with cars; the warning triangles on the backs of the buggies were a reluctant concession to safety

Cornstalks bending away from the wind-borne snow

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com.

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website.

For another of my weblogs celebrating the rural traditions of America, go to http://leerentz.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/cades-cove-app…the-past-tense/

A Clark’s Nutcracker, face stained red (I’m not sure why), using its sharp bill to probe between the pine cone scales of Whitebark Pine for pine nuts

We hiked along the shore of turquoise Bow Lake, then up through the conifer forest to timberline, where there was a dense stand of Whitebark Pines. We paused at a viewpoint, looking out over a barren and rocky basin that looked as if a glacier had just left. The silence of the place was loudly interrupted by the arrival of a gray, black, and white bird yelling “khaa-khaa-khaa!” The Clark’s Nutcracker completely ignored us, and immediately begain feeding on the Whitebark Pine cones, prying open the scales and extracting the big pine nuts within. We didn’t realize it at the time, but what we were witnessing was one of the great ecological stories of the Rocky Mountains.

I love pine nuts. Their resinous flavor is a great addition to salads, especially when they are toasted in olive oil with salt and fresh-ground pepper in a hot pan. Our pine nuts come from Costco, already shelled and in small bags imported from Asia (nuts which gourmets consider inferior to those imported from Spain and Portugal). Lord knows we don’t need the calories, but the nuts sure are good. In nature, the calories in Whitebark Pine nuts are crucial to wildlife, including Clark’s Nutcrackers, Red Squirrels, Black Bears, and Grizzly Bears. Since the nuts are 52% fat and 21% protein, they give bears the energy for a long winter and birds and squirrels a lot of energy in one big (compared to most seeds) package.

Scientists have studied Clark’s Nutcrackers extensively, because these birds have coevolved with Whitebark Pine–each becoming dependent upon the other. The nutcrackers get the nuts, of course, which are vitally important as food for adults and young. The pine, as well, has become dependent on the birds for spreading its seeds around. This is because the nutcracker caches most of its seeds, rather than consuming them immediately. The birds cache from one to 30 seeds–but typically three to five–burying them under about an inch of gravelly soil. Some caches are forgotten: after all, who can possibly remember the location of the 9,500 to 30,000 small caches that each bird makes? Those forgotten caches, wetted by the rains and snows of the high country, will often sprout new seedlings that hope to become the forests of tomorrow.

Balancing high on cones and twigs in a high wind sometimes requires using wings for balance

What is remarkable is how effective a bird is at remembering most of its caches. Clark’s Nutcrackers are related to ravens, jays, and crows, a group of birds that goes far beyond the label of “bird brains.” Ravens play like humans do, sliding down snowy slopes and cackling with glee. Crows are smart enough to remember individual human faces. Jays, such as the Steller’s Jays at my feeder, certainly know me as the source of their whole peanuts. Clark’s Nutcrackers, like their relatives, are intelligent and have good spacial mapping abilities, so that they can find the nuts they’ve stored.

Their acrobatic abilities are also well developed, with the ability to balance on cones and branches, in windy conditions, while opening cones with the long, strong bill. When they extract a seed, they first hold it in the bill, then deftly store it in a pouch under the tongue. When the pouch is full, they fly off to a suitable spot on the ground and create a cache for the stored nuts.

Clark’s Nutcrackers harvest the pine nuts from mid-summer until sometime in October. They use the caches during the season when seeds are unavailable–especially for feeding the young. During the nut harvest season, they compete with Red Squirrels for the nuts, and sometimes with Black Bears who climb the trees to get at the cones. The squirrels snip off branches and carry them to storage piles, called middens. Grizzly Bears and Black Bears will often raid these middens, taking the easy way out to get a big load of rich calories for minimal effort prior to their long winter’s sleep. I’m sure this makes the squirrels really mad, but that’s just the way it goes in nature, where tooth and claw (literally, in the case of bears) rules.

Whitebark Pines are beautiful trees, even in death, and I have several times photographed their bleached white skeletons on windy ridges of the Olympic and Cascade Mountains. But there are more of these skeletons than I would like to see, which is the result of two diseases that ravage the pines. The first is White Pine Blister Rust, which is a disease introduced to Europe and North America, apparently from Asia. This blister rust is a fungus that has a complex life cycle, which requires the fungus to also have a gooseberry/current shrub as a host, and depends upon airborne spores to travel between the pines and the gooseberry bushes. It kills pines in the white pine group, which have five needles, a group that includes Eastern White Pine, Sugar Pine, Whitebark Pine, and several others. The best way to control the disease is to eliminate all gooseberry and current bushes from an area, which is a major undertaking.

Whitebark Pine (photographed in Washington State) probably dying from a Mountain Pine Beetle infestation

The second killer of pines is the Mountain Pine Beetle, which has devastated huge sections of the Rocky Mountains in Canada and the USA. Lodgepole Pines have been hit especially hard by the beetle, which drills into the living tissue of the pine, preventing the tissue from carrying nutrients. Where a rocky mountain forest has been badly hit, a whole mountainside looks rusty red instead of green; it is ugly. Foresters and ecologists believe that a long series of warmer and drier summers, perhaps an outcome of global warming, has tipped the balance in favor of the killer beetle by allowing bigger populations of the beetle to survive the winters in the high country. When we were in Canada, some mills appeared  to be specializing in taking truckload after truckload of pines killed by the beetle.

Whitebark Pine struggling for life in the high country of Olympic National Forest in Washington

Think of the consequences of the deaths of so many Whitebark Pines: Clark’s Nutcrackers would go into a steep decline without the ready supply of nuts; Whitebark Pines wouldn’t have the nutcrackers spreading around their seeds, so fewer seedlings would get a start; and squirrels and bears would lose an energy-rich food source, probably reducing their numbers.  All in all, the forests at timberline would be ghostly and quiet with death, their white trunks gleaming under a full moon.

A pine nut in its bill, this Clark’s Nutcracker will temporarily store this nut in a pouch under its tongue, then will fly off to cache the nut, with several others, under the soil on a mountain slope

We watched and photographed the Clark’s Nutcracker for about fifteen minutes; there were several in the vicinity, but it seems like one persistent individual kept returning to the same clump of trees. The noisy activity was a delight to watch.

For more information about Whitebark Pines and their role as a keystone species in the high Rockies, go to:

Banff National Park Whitebark Pine

Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation

US Fish & Wildlife Service Endangered Species

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com.

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website.

Hiker and cairns create a striking silhouette against Hungabee Mountain, high on the Opabin Plateau

Cathedral Mountain, viewed on a still and frosty morning across Lake O’Hara from the cabins of Lake O’Hara Lodge

Reflections of rock and trees on the still waters of Hungabee Lake on the Opabin Plateau

Golden Alpine Larches on a sunny day, with snowy Mount Schaffer in the distance

Trail through snow and Alpine Larches, heading up toward Opabin Lake

A loose snow avalanche, one of many we saw and heard, coming down Hungabee Mountain; the avalanches here made a strange screeching sound that we had never before heard

Colors on the surface of Lefroy Lake along the trail to Lake Oesa

Alpine Larches reflecting in Hungabee Lake

Cathedral Mountain reflecting in Lake O’Hara

A canoeist fishing the surreal waters of Lake O’Hara

The primeval basin of Lake Oesa

Victoria Falls thundering down through a gouge it carved in a cliff

Rock in Hungabee Lake, with reflections of the cliffs of Yukness Mountain

Reflections of Alpine Larches and the shaded, snow-covered slope of Mount Schaffer, in Hungabee Lake

Mount Huber and a flank of Yukness Mountain reflected in Hungabee Lake on the Opabin Plateau

Unsettled weather on Mount Huber

Opabin Lake, nestled below Hungabee Mountain and other peaks touching the sky; we watched and listened as a Zen Buddhist meditated with help of a clear bell above this lake

Odaray Mountain and Cathedral Mountain reflecting on the still morning surface of Lake O’Hara

Mount Huber rising magnificently over Lake O’Hara

The aqua waters of Victoria Lake, on the trail to Lake Oesa

The lovely turquoise waters of one of the Morning Glory Lakes, with golden Alpine Larches

Alpine Larches and snowy slopes on the descent from the Opabin Plateau

Lake O’Hara from Opabin Prospect, with Wiwaxy Peaks and Cathedral Mountain in the distance

Opabin Lake, in the cirque below Hungabee Mountain

The snowy cliffs of Mount Hungabee

Smoky gold Alpine Larch with rock grooved by a glacier, on the Opabin Plateau below Schaffer Ridge

Alpine Larches occupying the Opabin Plateau, with Mount Schaffer and Cathedral Mountain rising above

A colorful corner of Victoria Lake

Rocks and reflections in one of the Cascade Lakes on the Opabin Plateau

Reflections in Hungabee Lake

The morning view from the shoreline in front of the Lake O’Hara Lodge cabins, with Cathedral Mountain rising in the distance

This Seattle Mountaineers photography trip into the Canadian Rockies was ably led by Linda Moore. Yoho National Park is, in my opinion, the most beautiful place in the Canadian Rockies and perhaps in all of North America. For more information about Yoho National Park, go to the Parks Canada web site.

For other entries in my weblog about Yoho National Park, go to Ice, Wolverine,  Early Snow,  Night at Yoho, Elizabeth Parker Hut and Fairy Barf.

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com.

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website.

We had hoped to see one of three species of ptarmigan on our hikes, but we struck out. On our last day in Yoho, we talked about not seeing ptarmigans, and I said we were more likely to see a grouse along the forested, lower elevation trail we were hiking. Within a couple of minutes, I looked up the trail and there was a Spruce Grouse standing right in the trail! It was a male, painted with bright red eye shadow. This species is also known as “fool hen,” because it is rather oblivious to the presence of people. We pointed cameras at it for nearly ten minutes at close range, and the grouse showed little nervousness about us.

Male Spruce Grouse in the spruce-fir forest of Yoho

The day before our grouse experience, we were hiking on the Opabin Plateau, which is a glacial hanging valley populated with Wolverines, Grizzly Bears, and Zen Buddhists–of which we observed only the latter on our two day trips into this valley. But what interested me? Squirrel sex! A lady Red Squirrel sat

Cute Red Squirrel eating seeds from a cone

demurely on a conifer branch, nibbling at a cone and allowing us to approach close enough to get some nice pictures. She was lovely. Then another squirrel appeared, and began chasing our lady ’round and ’round, up and down and around tree trunks, and dashing over the mossy forest floor. Finally he caught her and they mated. Then another chase. Then he caught her again; this time

Whispering into her ear, while she nibbles on a fir cone

she picked up and gnawed on a Douglas Fir cone while mating, as if bored with the whole act. Then another chase. And another mating. She chewed some more on her cone. My female hiking companions finally got tired of watching animal porn; and from then on they refused to point out any more squirrels to me!

Rated R for implied sexuality

I hadn’t realized that fairies lived in Yoho National Park, but we saw evidence of them all the time. Along the trails were little patches of puke, where fairies who nipped a bit too much on the ambrosia of the Canadian Rockies spilled their guts on the morning after. Actually, these patches of puke are Fairy Barf lichens, with plenty of tiny chunks against a bilious green background.

Fairy Barf lichen, Icmadophila ericetorum

We had seen enough lakes at Yoho to realize that nearly every medium sized lake and tarn contained a resident Barrow’s Goldeneye. These ducks spend the waning autumn days at these subalpine lakes, constantly diving for aquatic

Female Barrow’s Goldeneye on a turquoise lake

insects. In the clear mountain lakes, I could watch the goldeneyes as they swam underwater. In fact, the first time I saw one from above, I could follow its trail underwater by the cloud of silt it stirred up as it swam along the bottom. These ducks were only going to enjoy their Canadian Rockies vacations for a short time, since ice would soon seal all of the lakes and tarns; then they would have to fly to their wintering grounds to the south.

Barrow’s Goldeneye caught in the act of diving

Swimming underwater in a clear lake; the goldeneye uses both its feet and its wings during a dive

Popping to the surface

Faint trails in the bottom of the lake, which I believe were made by diving Barrow’s Goldeneyes

A couple of little birds love this high country; two come to mind. The American Pipit enjoys Canada as much as this American, and spends its time searching for food on the rocky shores of mountain lakes. The American Dipper walks underwater along mountain streams and lakes.

American Pipit, which constantly wags its tail up and down while searching the shores of a mountain lake for insects and plant seeds, in nonbreeding plumage

Juvenile American Dipper resting between underwater sessions of searching a stream for aquatic insects; the dipper is named for its habit of constantly dipping up and down by flexing its legs

An American Dipper who really didn’t want its picture taken, hightailing it away from me

Male Fairies in these woods have a poor sense of direction, and would be too embarrassed to ask a mere human for directions, so they’ve created an elaborate system of maps. I didn’t fully understand the maps, but I’m not supposed to, as I am not a Fairy .

Map lichen showing Fairy trails

A more colorful Map Lichen, Rhizocarpon geographicum

When we visited Yoho, the wildflowers were essentially done for the year. But seed heads of several species could still be found before the falling of autumn snows covered them for the winter. This included the Western Anemone, which is also known as “Hippie Stick” and “Towhead Baby,” and which has a prominent crown of feathery seeds that reminds humans of hair.

“Give me a head with hair, long beautiful hair, shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen” (lyric from the musical, Hair)

When we ventured above timberline, we would see rodents that looked like oversized chipmunks, except that the face is not striped like chipmunks. These Golden-mantled Ground Squirrels live in burrows under rocks in the high country, and have learned that humans sometimes leave behind bits of crackers and cheese and nuts–or that these big creatures will sometimes hand them free food, often with strange chuckling sounds coming from their upturned mouths.

Golden-mantled Ground Squirrel hoping for a handout

We didn’t see any large browsing animals in Yoho, though Elk and Moose are found in the park. The closest we came was seeing this track in the snow, several miles from Lake O’Hara. The details are obscured by the snow, so I cannot say for sure if if was an Elk or a Moose.

Elk or Moose track in the snow, showing dewclaw marks (at the top) which are shown when the large mammal is trotting or running

Below is a gallery of lichen photographs. I don’t recall ever being in a place so rich with lichen diversity. It takes patience to look close and photograph these miniature designs, which consist of a cooperative combination of fungus and algae. I am not an expert at identification of lichens, so if anyone out there in blogland knows more than I do, feel free to identify some of these by genus and species or to correct me.

Goblet Lichens, with the rims of the goblets ringed with tiny ice crystals, reminding me a bit of margaritas

Identification anyone?

Stereocaulon tomentosum

I believe that the taller lichen behind is Cladonia gracilis ssp turbinata

Peltigera neopolydactyla

Identification anyone?

Peltigera sp.

A semi-aquatic lichen photographed on the rocks ringing one of the Morning Glory Lakes; identification anyone?

Finally, we saw a variety of mushrooms on this trip. Rather than try to identify these, I’ll just show them to you for your interest; I especially liked the combination of mushrooms and snow.

This Seattle Mountaineers photography trip into the Canadian Rockies was ably led by Linda Moore. Yoho National Park is, in my opinion, the most beautiful place in the Canadian Rockies and perhaps in all of North America. For more information about Yoho National Park, go to the Parks Canada web site.

For other entries in my weblog about Yoho National Park, go to Ice, Wolverine,  Early Snow,  Night at Yoho, and Elizabeth Parker Hut.

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com.

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website.

Elizabeth Parker Hut has simple and elegant log architecture that makes it a timeless place to stay

As a quiet and introspective kind of fellow, the thought of staying in a hut with 23 other people was scary. But I was won over on this Canadian Rockies trip by two hut experiences; in this story I’ll describe the experience of staying in Yoho’s Elizabeth Parker Hut, where we stayed for four nights.

Four of us shared the hut with an adventure tour group of ten Japanese people, mostly middle-aged, and their two young Japanese-Canadian guides. The Japanese spoke few words of English, and only one of us was adept at learning any words of Japanese, so we depended upon the Japanese-Canadian guides to be translators. They were both friendly guys with a good sense of humor, and had long ago learned to span different cultures with a smile. One highlight was the last night both our groups were together, when one of the guides played 1960s and 1970s American folk songs, so some of us, ahem, older people, knew a lot of the words. The hut was pulsing to the tune of John Denver’s Country Roads, with the Americans singing along, and the Japanese, who didn’t understand any of the words, clapping along. It was great fun!

A Japanese adventure travel group occupied one big table during meals, while our Seattle Mountaineers group took the other

Elizabeth Parker Hut sits in perhaps the most stunning setting in North America, a small subalpine meadow surrounded by towering and shapely peaks of the Canadian Rockies. Originally built in 1919 (with its associated Wiwaxy Cabin in 1912) by the Canadian Pacific Railway to promote tourism to this most beautiful part of Canada, the hut was later transferred to the Alpine Club of Canada.

The ACC was created in 1906, with Elizabeth Parker among several founders. Ms. Parker, a feminist of the time and a fiery journalist who loved the mountains, was adamant that she wanted to see a Canadian alpine club, rather than just a section of the comparable American club. Her patriotism won the day, and the ACC has had a vital presence ever since. In fact, while researching this brief article, I found that the ACC has even expanded into New York’s Adirondack Mountains, where it maintains a beautiful log cabin for members to use as a hut, located on about 100 acres in the Keene area (an old stomping ground of ours).

Towering Wiwaxy Peaks rose prominently above our cabin

For people who stay at the hut, there is a beautiful kitchen, with a full complement of pots and pans of all sizes. We hauled water in buckets from a nearby creek, and one of the morning jobs each day was to boil water in big pots, so the kitchen was always steamy in the early hours. There are propane lights, but before dawn and after dark, headlamps are a must if you want to know what’s cooking. And what’s cooking for Karen and I was our normal backpacking meals. The Japanese ate healthier fare prepared by the guides, including boiled rice, lots of fresh vegetables, seaweed, and fish. It looked and smelled great!

The kitchen is wonderfully equipped, and includes propane stoves so that hikers don’t have to cook out in the elements

Sleeping arrangements are cozy. A giant bunk bed, made for 16 people, stretches across the whole room. Eight people on the top and eight people on the bottom snore in unison after the 10:00 p.m. lights out. The changing room consists of the interior of one’s sleeping bag, which takes a bit of getting used to but is not bad. Heat is provided by an efficient wood stove, so the interior is comfortable, except when the stove is over-stoked and the temperature soars. The climb to the upper bunks is fun, and takes me back to my Boy Scout days of staying in remote cabins. Which reminds me, staying in a hut is a lot like those old Boy Scout outings, except that there are girls in the cabins at Yoho.

Bunks and drying rack shared by all the occupants

After days of hiking in the rain and snow, gear gets pretty wet. In the hut there is an ingenious pully system that raises and lowers two big drying racks, so stuff can quickly dry in the heat at the peak of the cabin. Boots are discouraged in the cabin; we left those at the door and ran around in our stocking feet.

Midnight rambles to the outhouse are a necessary part of hut living; fortunately that gave us a chance to check on the weather. One night it was snowing, another night it was clear and moonlit–a magical experience.

We really enjoyed the company of the Japanese; one of the men called me a “picture master,” and he was certainly the flute master. We loved hearing him play his bamboo flute outdoors, with the notes floating over the frosty landscape …

The flute master on a frosty morning; the flute master writes his own blog at http://keiichiwaseda.blogspot.com/

As I mentioned, Elizabeth Parker Hut was built early in the previous century. Lake O’Hara became a favorite destination of the Canadian Group of Seven painters, who created some of the best landscape paintings of the 20th Century. One of the group, J.E.H. MacDonald, painted an interior of Elizabeth Parker Hut circa 1925; it is interesting to view the painting in comparison to the hut interior now: Lodge Interior, Lake O’Hara (you will need to scroll through a group of beautiful paintings to get to this one).

A blazing fire helps dry our wet boots and clothing

One of the Japanese-Canadian guides, preparing breakfast by headlamp in the predawn

Each day, Cathedral Mountain snags the first and last warm sunlight of the day, providing encouragement to the frosty valley below

Half a dozen of us could easily be preparing meals at the same time

With scenery like Mount Huber outside the hut, it is simply a remarkable place to stay!

Some of our Japanese friends on the last day of their trip

Our group at breakfast; the Japanese group had departed the day before, leaving five of us in the hut for one night

Le Relais Day Shelter is the place where hut dwellers catch the bus back to civilization. In addition to the warmth inside, the shelter sells coffee, hot chocolate, and best of all, huge slabs of carrot cake (I had one most days after hiking). This shelter is half a mile from the Elizabeth Parker Hut.

Elizabeth Parker Hut is surrounded by the stunning mountains of the Canadian Rockies

Visits to the Lake O’Hara region of Yoho National Park are severely restricted by Parks Canada; even day hikers have to take a bus in for the day and their numbers are regulated (42 per day maximum). To make a hut reservation, a good first step is to read the Alpine Club of Canada’s Elizabeth Parker Hut Information. Then review the policies of Yoho National Park regarding Lake O’Hara. This should get you started; remember that demand is high and supply is low, so be prepared to jump on the phone to make reservations at the first moment possible. It will be one of the most memorable experiences of your life.

This Seattle Mountaineers photography trip into the Canadian Rockies was ably led by Linda Moore. Yoho National Park is, in my opinion, the most beautiful place in the Canadian Rockies and perhaps in all of North America. For more information about Yoho National Park, go to the Parks Canada web site.

For other entries in my weblog about Yoho National Park, go to Ice and Wolverine and Early Snow and Night at Yoho.

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com.

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website.