Colfax Adventures

This morning, I had the good fortune to visit the Colfax Trail. It follows a former railroad route along the Palouse River north/west of Colfax, WA. I hadn't visited it before, and I liked it a lot - since it's mainly in a riparian setting, it's rather lush, with a lot of wooded sections of ponderosa and cottonwood forest. Not to mention the nice views of the river and its canyon walls. The trail also has a fairly wild and private feel, since the cliffs and hills do a good job of sheltering the trail from the surrounding sights and sounds of civilization. It's an interesting change of pace, then, from the general spread of the Palouse.

The first image is the one that I ended up genuinely liking. This is from near the beginning of the trail, shortly after sunrise. There were bits of pieces of mist floating around the valley, and I managed to time this one fairly well in that regard. If and when I edit the RAW file in Lightroom, getting the sky to look right will be a challenge, but it's a good enough composition that it might be worth a shot. F/22.

The following images are ones that I'm not quite so sure about, or that would take a lot of work.

The next one looks over the Palouse River through a flowering shrub. I was characteristically lazy about figuring out what it was while I was there, but if I had to guess now, I'd say this is red-osier dogwood (Cornus stolonifera). I used F/4.5 to blur the river in the background.

In this one, I framed the canyon wall with a cottonwood tree. It gives a good sense of the character of the views from the trail, at least the first third or so.

Finally, the canyon walls with what I am guessing is mallow ninebark in the foreground. I like the composition, but the lighting is a bit contrasty for my tastes, and the colors a bit muted. Even so, it might be interesting to play with this in Lightroom and see if I can get it to look better. This image was from a mere 8am - even by that time, the lighting starts to get a bit too harsh on a sunny day. F/32.

I'm hoping to make a return visit on a cloudy day. I might be able to experiment more with some views of the canyon walls, especially toward the end of the trail (where it'd be hard to get to on a sunny day in time for good light).