Flaming Geyser State Park

The park gets its names from two methane seeps; the methane is deep underground and was first unearthed during exploration for coal. One seep burns ("flaming geyser") and another is underwater and produces bubbles ("bubbling geyser"). Although I didn't take any pictures of them, I did end up visiting the two geysers out of curiosity. The "flaming geyser" is a few inches high and only faintly visible. The "bubbling geyser" is also very small and, although the gray chemical deposits it leaves are interesting, releases quite a stench. It was interesting, to be sure, to see them and read about where the gas comes from and how coal exploration helped provide the gas a pathway to the surface. They weren't, however, an overriding photographic destination.

But I had other goals in mind. The park sits on the Green River, with numerous trails through nice forest with periodic river access.

We'll start with a couple of images overlooking the Green River through some characteristically mossy branches. In this case, I was particularly attracted to the chance to set the mossy branches in the foreground against other mossy branches on the opposite side of the river, all the while including the river in the composition. In both of these images, I used f/18 to keep everything in focus - any loss of detail would have obscured the mossy branches in the background and thus deprived this image of its context, which in this case was part of the interest.

The treat at the end of the trail is a view up the steep walls of the Green River Gorge. One thing that caught my eye was a mossy tree - a maple, I believe - growing from a little ledge on the canyon wall. I was attracted to the contrast between the green gnarly branches and the stark reddish-brown cliffs. I  photographed this scene at a variety of focal lengths; what you see below is the closest. Farther focal lengths minimized the tree too much and lacked a clear subject.

There are some wetlands in the park, too, and while the trails generally keep their distance, you can catch a few glimpses. The lichen-covered trees on the edges of the marshes and ponds caught my eye; I wanted to set them against the numerous cattails. Below is my best composition. I used f/32 to keep everything in focus; any background blur would have reduced the lichen-covered branches to a formless blob. Not okay!

The next image gives a sense of what the forest was like. I thought the split in the foreground trunk was interesting, as was the general lushness and mossiness of the scene.

Finally, an image of Christy Creek. This waterway, which flows into the Green River, spreads out and flows around some little islands of trees as it approaches the river. I had a tough time making an image that captured this; my best result is below. I included the cedar branch to add a bit of depth. I used f/20 to keep everything in focus. My shutter speed was 1.6 seconds. (I had to use ISO 500 to get this speed; at ISO 200, which is my camera's default setting, the shutter speed was actually too long, creating a smoother blur than I wanted).

At this point, you've probably noticed the glare on the cedar branches and are asking, "Well, why didn't you use your polarizing filter?" I did, but I couldn't use it at its full intensity - to do so would have cut out too much of the water's reflection, eliminating any sense of the water's motion at the bottom right of the frame. I needed to dial it back a bit, at the cost of a bit of glare on leaves and branches.

This may or may not end up being my last post of 2013. If so, thanks for putting up with me this year, and happy new year!

Epiphytes Never Sleep, Ep. 2

Winter in the Puget Sound forests is hardly worthy of the name, at least compared to so many winters elsewhere, and even nearby in the mountains. It would be more accurate to say that the growing season just takes a short nap, and the woods exchange one green garment for another. Whereas in spring and summer, leaves and bright new needles steal the show, epiphytes - such as moss and licorice ferns - are the green attraction in the winter. In Saint Edward State Park, epiphytes light up groves of deciduous trees that would otherwise be bare and dreary.

This first image is of a bigleaf maple trunk thus festooned. I tried it at two different apertures: f/5.6 (pictured) and f/22. I decided to post the wider of the two because the selective focus helps to simplify the image, keeping attention on the trunk and the mossy branches by eliminating distracting detail from the background. (The Picasa uploading process, with its automatic adjustments, has changed the contrast and saturation a bit. The air was a bit foggy, and if I were to fully process this image, that would come out more clearly, adding to the isolation of the foreground elements.)

This second image involves more maple (and I think some alder) trunks. I set the aperture to f/16 to get everything in focus; all the elements were too far away to effectively try anything involving selective focus. I like the way the trunks all converge; a thicker fog would have made this image more effective, but I only have so much control over weather conditions. I also like the contrast between the greens on the trees and the reddish dormant shrub cover toward the bottom.

Sauk It To Me!

Although I wouldn't consider myself a believer in astrology, I sometimes look at my horoscope online - it shows up automatically when I open up Yahoo. It's funny to see whether it comes true - and even funnier, when it gives advice, to see how my mind bends and twists that advice to reinforce whatever I was going to do in a given day anyway. For instance, this morning, it told me to "hunker down with [my] favorite entertainment," and suggested "binge-watching" a television show or going to a movie theater.

Binge-watch a TV show? Really? On a Saturday morning? And one that, by the way, was forecast to be dry? I don't think so! In my characteristic fashion, I chose to interpret the astrological advice broadly enough to include hiking. After all, that's how I like to entertain myself!

And a funny thing happened to me on my way to the Old Sauk River Trail - and again on the way back: I stopped at a conveniently located city park in Darrington to take pictures of Whitehorse Mountain, which was partially shrouded in clouds. I don't usually do straight-on mountain shots; I like to have something framing the mountain or otherwise providing a foreground. But Whitehorse is interesting on its own, and the clouds helped provide some depth and contrast. I experimented with several different focal lengths; the one you see below, the one I liked the best, was zoomed the farthest in of any of them. (This image is also from the morning. When I stopped to take a second stab at it on my way back in the afternoon, the clouds were still interesting but the lighting was not as good.)

The scenic highlight of the trail was probably the ice-coated boulders in the Sauk River, so I'll start with those images. I tried two different apertures with this first angle, so I'm going to post them both. The first is f/18 at 1/3 second; the second is f/7.1 at 1/8 second. (The shutter speeds are relatively similar because I wanted to keep the level of blur somewhat consistent; I changed ISO settings to keep them close). I'm not sure whether I like the wide or narrow depth of field better, which is why I posted both.

The next image looks at an ice-covered boulder in isolation. I originally tried using a shutter speed of 2 seconds - my usual approach with set-ups like this is to get as long of a shutter speed as I can and maximize the blur of the water. But in this case, the waves were so rapid and choppy that 2 seconds created too much blur, and the water was basically a formless gray area. So I opened up the aperture to f/7.1 and used a shutter speed of 1/4 second. The upshot was a narrower depth of field, which I actually like as well.

For this next image, I used a shutter speed of 1.6 seconds to smoothly blur the motion of the water (in contrast to the approach I used above).

The second scenic highlight of the trail was the moss that covered most of the trees and their branches. The attracting feature of this first moss shot was the backlighting; the camera is pointing toward a clearing, hence the light coming from behind the subjects. I used f/5.6 to blur the background and emphasize the front clump of moss.

Here is a broader view of the mossy forest. This gives you more of an idea of what the more thickly forested portions of the trail looked like. I used f/16 to get everything in focus. Compositions like this are always difficult to pull off, because they tend to get a bit busy. This one isn't too bad, though, because I managed to capture a lot of branches that were going the same way.

This next one has an epiphyte-covered snag in the foreground with alders in the background. I think the snag is of a cottonwood tree, although I could easily be wrong. I used f/5.6 to blur the background and emphasize the fern-covered trunk.

Finally, one more view of the river. This shot isn't terribly interesting, although I like the perspective. I used a shutter speed of 1.3 seconds to smoothly blur the water's motion.

Ice Is Not Enough

This Saturday's photo excursion created a bit of a quandary when it came to choosing a location. It was going to be sunny, so a pure forest destination was out. It was so dry that, despite the cold temperatures,  I was going to be hard-pressed to find interesting frost formations. Finally, I didn't have the time for a long drive. I settled on the Wilderness Creek/Peak area of Cougar Mountain, setting my sights on the modest goal of photographing ice formations along the creek itself.

But the ice formations along the creek, at least at the points accessible by trail, were not as photogenic as I had hoped. I found some snow up high, but much of it was rather lumpy and patchy. And the valley I was in received more morning sunlight than I had assumed. So I only came away with a couple interesting pictures.

Still, it was nice to be out and about in the great outdoors, even if it was quite chilly. The cold air and sunshine were refreshing.And there was no mud on the trail anywhere! Earth stood hard as iron, as the poet says. But the air was so cold that, by midmorning, there were significant ice formations inside my water bottle, and it was getting hard to open. So, though it was beautiful and surprisingly pleasant, I wanted to get out before my water became like a stone!

The first image is of some sort of fungus growing on a dead, decaying log. I had to work quickly to capture the speckled light coming through the trees - I've frequently attempted images in lighting conditions like this, only to have the sun move and put my subject either in the shade or in full sunlight. Thankfully, this one worked. I used f/9 to compromise between isolating the fungus in front, and keeping the background discernible.

The second one is of the trail near the summit of Wilderness Peak. I usually don't do trail shots, but I really liked how the sunlight was shafting along it; the snow on either side accentuated this effect. I accomplished the star effect by stopping down to f/18, using the widest angle I had available, and positioning the camera so that the sun was just peeking around a tree - in sum, turning the sun into a point source of light.

Cheers, and happy winter!

Land of Many Uses

As you drive eastward from Granite Falls along the Mountain Loop Highway, you'll see a sign for the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest that reads, "Land of Many Uses." Indeed. The Mountain Loop Highway is an interesting study in contrasts, because while some places have been "intensively managed"(logged), others have been left in their original state, making the area a patchwork quilt of human use and impact.

But nowhere is this more apparent than on the Lake Twenty-Two and Heather Lake trails. In some ways, these trails are almost the same trail. They are right next to each other, are a similar length, gain a similar amount of elevation, and terminate at similar lakes beneath the same mountain (Mount Pilchuck). The approaches to these lakes, however, are quite different. The Heather Lake trail, as I've narrated before, passes through areas that were heavily logged; those forests are dark and uniform. Only the final stretch of trail passes through old growth. The Lake Twenty-Two trail, as I discovered yesterday, is almost entirely in old-growth forest. The greater diversity of plant species and tree ages is painfully apparent.

Some say that this makes the Lake Twenty-Two trail a better hike. Overall, this is probably correct, although since the lakes aren't exactly the same, it's still fruitful to visit both trails. Moreover, it's an interesting way to compare an old-growth forest with a second-growth forest in almost identical conditions.

The lake itself, in the process of freezing over and with snowy cliffs behind it, posed quite a photographic challenge. I didn't want to just do a straight shot of the lake and the mountain behind it; while this is often a strong first instinct when approaching a lake like this, it can result in an image that's flat and, ultimately, not particularly interesting. I wanted some sort of a subject to compare with the lake; a foreground. The background cliffs, however, were so splotchy and high-contrast that many of the subjects I looked at would have been lost in that contrast - either that or the background cliffs would have been an indiscriminate mess of light and dark splotches.

My brother pointed out some interesting ice formations on the shore. Could I use those? I thought about it, but if I were to get my camera low enough to get a compelling perspective and include a satisfactory amount of the cliffs, the lake ice would be lost as a prominent subject. But then I noticed a few places on the shore where the ice had broken, revealing an inches-thick cross-section of the lake ice. Since I now had a subject that had vertical depth, I could get my camera low to the ground for a good perspective and not lose the subject.

This particular shot called for the "heavy artillery": my mini-tripod and my ultra-wide lens. I used f/22 because I wanted both the foreground ice and the background cliffs to be in focus.

This second image comes from near the trailhead. A little stream was coming down the slope right next to the trail, and I wanted to juxtapose that against its forest surroundings (without actually having the trail in the composition). To do that, I had to, once again, get the tripod down rather low. I used f/22 to keep everything in focus; in retrospect, I probably should have tried this image with selective focus as well, but I still like the result.

The hike isn't all in forest; there's a short stretch of switchbacks through some rockier, more open slopes. I found these - they seem to be the withered remains of some sort of flower, but I'm not exactly sure what species. They were on a shrub. Since I was very close to these, I was able to use f/6.3, to get more of the foreground flower in focus, and still keep the background blurred.

The aforementioned rocky slopes have some nice views, too. The image below looks out over the valley of the South Fork Stillaguamish River. For this particular image, I used a graduated neutral density filter to darken the sky and the sunlit portion of the image.

Finally, on the upper reaches of those open slopes grow some bigleaf maples. When their leaves, as well as those of surrounding shrubs, have fallen, their mossy trunks and branches really stand out.

Finally, the forest. I didn't get many forest images, because forest pictures are difficult to do well, as I've written about before. This one is only so-so, but it's pleasant enough, with trees of different ages in the foreground, and a stream in the background.

Pattycake, Pattycake, Baker's Stream

As if to make amends for last week's debacle, I was granted the rare November gift of a dry, sunny Saturday. Cold? Yes, quite - icicles hung from boulders, ice adorned tree branches, and a thick layer of ice adorned streamside rocks. I visited the Baker River trail, to make up for last week's fiasco. This time, no snow on the road. A bit of frost here and there, particularly on the bridges, but all manageable. There was some crusty snow on the trail, but not too much - just enough to make things fun. I love stepping in snow. Additionally, I was able to hike the entire length of the trail! There were no bears to stop me this time, and the little streams were all bridged or manageable. The view of Shuksan from Sulphide Creek was such a nice treat at journey's end.

We'll begin with the morning's salient feature: frost. The first image looks through some icy branches across the Baker River valley. I had to hurry to take this image while that bit of mist was still in the frame; it wasn't there long. In addition to being cool-looking, it brings out the trees on the opposite side of the river.

Additionally, the moss was icy. I've done icy/snowy moss pictures before, but not as close as this time. The main technical challenge was tripod placement. The first image came from the side of a tree, I think; the second, I believe, from a boulder. Or they might have both been from boulders. I don't actually remember. But anyway, when taking a closeup of an object at eye-level, it's hard to get the tripod as close as it needs to be without the tripod legs running into the tree/boulder/adjacent bush, going down the slope beyond the trail into a tangled quagmire of moss and branches, or otherwise getting into trouble. It takes some creative tripod adjustment and physical posture.

It's interesting - one of the things I'm realizing this year is that, as the wildflowers are long gone and trees' leaves have fallen, I'm noticing the less obtrusive plants in the forest, such as mosses, lichens, and fungi (although I haven't done photography of any fungi yet - maybe later). Their presence was particularly striking yesterday, as a coating of ice crystals decorated their contours.

I used apertures of f/8 and f/4.5, respectively. I particularly like how vividly the ice crystals show up in the second image.

Speaking of ice crystals, I noticed how, on a log, ice crystals had formed in little lines or rows. I am not sure why this was the case, but I found it an intriguing subject for photography. The challenge here was to get the rows to be discernible from one another, rather than have the image be a uniform jumble of ice crystals. I had to carefully choose which spot I was going to photograph, so that the gaps between the lines would be large enough to stand out in the image, and then make sure my camera was at a height that the gaps would appear (rather than being obscured behind other rows of crystals).

I used f/7.1 in both of these images, because I wanted surrounding ice crystals to fade out of focus a bit gradually. I thought this might help emphasize all the different depths. They're both a bit underexposed - camera meters don't like snow and ice; they try to read them as a neutral light value, which underexposes everything else. I even compensated a bit, and they're still dark. Not irreparably so, though. Just something to continue to be careful about.

As mentioned, there were lots of icicles on the boulders. I originally tried this image at a narrower aperture to keep everything in focus; the exposure ended up being so long, however, that the ferns moved in the breeze and blurred. So I decided to make this image with a wider aperture (f/6.3) and narrow depth of field.

This second was more difficult because, as the perspective suggests, the camera was tilted pretty far up. This was the best image that ended up being focused in anywhere close to the right place. I used f/5.6, because this got me background blur while saving just a bit of foreground detail - I didn't want the area of the icicle in focus to be too small.

Now, we'll shift gears from ice formations and look at a forest scene. Now that this bigleaf maple's green leaves have fallen (as have those of the alders in the background), the tangled contours of the green mossy branches appear much more distinctly. I liked the contrast between the moss and the bare forest in the background; I think including a bit of the forest-floor snow at bottom adds interest.

We'll conclude the post with a couple of views. The next set of two images are looking up at what I believe to be Hagan Mountain, up the Blum Creek valley, if I'm reading my map correctly. I took these images as I was hiking back to the trailhead; I liked the way the light was hitting the mountain, and the trees in the foreground, accentuating them against the shadowed valley. I tried a variety of focal lengths, and the two below were my favorites. The first, by including foreground trees on both sides of the frame, has some balance/symmetry. The second is not as balanced but emphasizes the mountain's presence a bit more.

Finally, the Baker River itself, looking upstream. This was a tricky one to expose, due to the high contrast between the dark foreground and the sunlit ridge in the background. but the result isn't bad. An exposure of 1/4 second blurred the water's motion.

And A Sauk To Hike A Block

Snow levels were low, but not too low - or so it seemed. Precipitation was tapering off - or so it seemed. I had my sights set yesterday morning on the Baker River Trail. I wanted to capture some images of fresh snow on the surrounding hillsides and mountains, something a snow level of about 1500-2000 feet should have enabled me to do. Alas, my plan went awry. On the access road - barely 1000 feet in elevation - snow appeared suddenly. A couple inches of slushy stuff. I pressed on at first, but as the snow on and around the road increased, I pulled over into a parking lot to consider the choice before me. I decided to turn around and find another trail.

It wasn't as though I couldn't drive in the road as it was, mind you - my car was just far enough off the ground to clear the snow, and there were nice bare/slushy tire tracks most of the way. The parking lot where I stopped was tricky to negotiate, but I managed to do it with minimal delay or frustration. Two possibilities worried me, however. The first was the possibility of more snow that day, as I knew snow levels were forecast to remain low. The second was the fact that I had twelve miles still to drive along the access road, and conditions had been deteriorating as I'd been driving and could have very feasibly continued to do so. Either of these possibilities could have gotten me into trouble in my low-clearance, two-wheel-drive, tire-chain-lacking, experienced-driver-lacking car.

Undeterred - or, rather, quite deterred, but defiantly unwilling to finish a Saturday empty-handed - I made an impulsive decision to turn head toward the Mountain Loop Highway, which I knew had some low-elevation hiking possibilities. En route, I saw a few nice views of snow-clad hills, but I didn't stop at all to take any pictures. I'm very picky - I don't like obvious clear cuts or human creations in my images, and these were present along the way. When I arrived at the Beaver Lake Trail on the Mountain Loop Highway - a trail I had never visited before, but of which I had read promising descriptions - steady rain greeted me. And continued to greet me the rest of the afternoon. Instead of trying to find yet another destination, I stuck it out there.

But I had a good time in spite of the deluge. The trail is very pleasant, mostly through airy deciduous forest, passing views of the Sauk River frequently enough to keep things interesting. "Beaver Lake" is not really a lake; it's more of an extended swamp, with lots of mossy trees growing out of it. But it's nice, both because it's pretty in its own right, and because while a lot of trails divert hikers around wetlands and such, the Beaver Lake Trail cuts right through them for an up-close look. Finally, the end of the trail features some old-growth cedars and a wide view of the Sauk.

Unfortunately, despite the agreeableness of the trail, the steady rain meant that I was not able to take very many pictures. During lulls in the rain (it never stopped; it only lightened up), I made only a few images. At the trails'-end view of the Sauk, the clouds never lifted enough to make a good images that included the snow-covered hillsides in the distance. The rain became heavy and turned to sleet, and I returned to the trailhead. And that, it seemed, was that. The photo trip was over, and though I'd acquired a couple semi-interesting images from the trail, the day's objective remained unfulfilled.

But as I left Darrington and drove homeward along Highway 530, the clouds began to thin a bit. Perhaps luck would be with me and I would get a good view of snowy hills or mountains. But where? As I said before, I'm picky. I remembered a pullout with a view of the North Fork Stillaguamish River, and there it was! A visible snow-clad hillside, some ribbons of cloud, and a bit of fall color. Finally, at the last moment, I had achieved my goal!

Below is the result. F/16. I like it, generally; I would ultimately need to adjust the white balance to give the image a more bluish color cast; the clouds were very bluish that evening.

Below are my two images from the Beaver Lake Trail. The first is of the Sauk River. I was initially attracted to the way the mossy alder branches swept across the frame, and the different layers of color in the background. The yellow-leaved tree in the foreground was at this point an obstacle, and I started to seek a vantage point that did not include it. I decided to try including it, though, and I'm glad I did - I think it adds some depth, and more interest to the foreground. I used f/18 to get everything in focus; the corresponding shutter speed of 1.6 seconds blurred the river. This posed the risk of the foreground foliage blurring due to even a slight breeze. I waited until the air was still and took several exposures; this was my best result.

This final image comes from near the end of the trail. The exposure settings presented a bit of a dilemma - I wanted to blur the background (wider aperture), but wanted a lot of the moss to be in focus rather than just a little bit of it (narrower aperture). I found no satisfactory compromise; the image you see below privileges detail in the foreground, meaning that there is not as much background blur as I would have preferred. F/8.

The Other Fall Color

This time of year, mountain lakes look a bit bleak at first glance. Most of the leaves have fallen, skies are gray, and there is not very much snow yet. When I took a jaunt to Heather Lake on Saturday, this was the world I was afraid I would be entering.

As I explored around the lake, however, a world of color unfolded before my eyes. There was, of course, the obvious - a few remaining yellow leaves, dark green conifers, white snowy cliffs. But the trees and shrubs that were bare were their own mosaic of color. Countless shades of red, brown, and gray intertwined in a silent kaleidoscope.

Although I had already been moving in this direction, this trip in particular is inspiring me to plan to be more active, photographically speaking, this winter than I have been other years. I'm realizing more and more that there is scenery to be had in the winter - in the form of lichen, evergreen trees, moss, and other epiphytes of various kinds.

This first image is of a shrub I can't identify. To save weight and space, I generally don't bring plant identification books along on my hikes. Instead, I try to do any necessary ID-ing when I get back. Sometimes this works. But, this time, I've been poring over my guide for quite a while with no success, so I'm going to throw the towel in for the time being, and hopefully figure out this plant's identity later. I wanted to juxtapose the shrub's bright colors against the snowy cliffs in the background. I wish the lake showed up a bit more prominently in this composition; otherwise, I like it. I used f/25 and set my focus point between the foreground and the background to get everything in focus.

Below is a close-up shot of that same bush. The fruits look almost like miniature pumpkins, without stems on top. I used an aperture of f/10 to keep some detail in the leaves; I liked the background shapes they created.

Below, a more generic shot of the lake. The foreground trees don't stand out as vividly as I had intended, but it's a nice composition. Perhaps some color balance adjustments in Lightroom would help remedy the situation and bring the foreground out. I took this particular image at f/22.

Now we'll start looking at some of those branches I wrote about earlier. This is another plant whose exact identity escapes me, although I suspect it might be Sitka alder. The branches swoop forward as you see in the picture to enable the plant to survive avalanches. Once again, I liked the color contrasts - the gray branches in the foreground, the brown branches in the middle, and the green trees and dusting of white snow in the background. I used my wide-angle lens and an aperture of f/22.

Below,  contrasted the striking red of red-osier dogwood branches against the lake. I tried a variety of different apertures, settling on f/20, because I wanted to preserve some detail in the background. Just before I took this particular shot, a very slight breeze kicked up. It didn't move the branches at all, but it did disturb the surface of the water ever so slightly. I ended up liking this effect; it creates a clearer demarcation between the background trees and their reflection in the lake.

Next is a wider perspective of a similar vantage point. The branches of various shrubs create leading lines toward the lake. I used f/22 here so I could get the whole image in focus.

For the next two images, I was attracted to the color contrast between a young evergreen tree and the yellows, oranges and browns of the surrounding branches and leaves. (Again, that unidentified shrub!) The first uses a relatively wide aperture (f/4.2) to isolate the tree, putting the surrounding branches out of focus. The second uses a narrow aperture (f/20) to put the tree and its surroundings all in focus. I like  both approaches to the subject matter.

There's more to the hike than the lake. While large portions of the trail pass through dark, relatively uninteresting second-growth coniferous forest, the upper third of the trail features some nice old-growth surroundings, and a few pretty little open areas. Consisting mostly of evergreen trees, the old-growth areas are just as bright and as green as ever.

I like the image below because it includes trees of varying sizes and ages, an important feature of old-growth forest. I also think the colorful trunk on the left looks really cool. I tried to find a composition involving just that trunk, but there were none to be found.

Below is a foliose lichen of some kind. I couldn't ID it from my book, but given that there are hundreds and hundreds of lichen species in the state, I'm not going to beat myself up about it. I wanted to contrast the bright green against the other lichens and the dull brown of the trunk. My only qualm about this composition is that the green lichen splits it basically in half, which is bad practice. I wish I had found a way to satisfactorily fill up more of the composition with the green. Still, it's nice.

Finally, there was an open area in the forest with some mossy boulders and a tangle of red-osier dogwood. Below was my best composition; I tried a variety of heights and vantage points, settling on a relatively low position. This makes the branches in the foreground "feel" much closer. I used f/20 to keep everything in focus.

In classic Cascades fashion - at least for me - it rained on Saturday afternoon. But fortunately, I was lucky this time and felt the first drop of rain just as I was reaching the trailhead. I've been rained on quite a bit this year, and it was satisfying to time a hike perfectly around the rain - and in November! I'll choose to interpret that as a good omen for this winter.