Olympic Extravaganza part 1

As I am enjoying all my newfound free time after my retirement from academia, I made a recent two-night trip to the Olympic Peninsula, primarily to see the Hoh Rainforest. It's really something else, with the volume of moss on the trees and the extensive old growth. The forest itself is also relatively open in places, both due to the varying age of the trees and the browsing of elk and other animals. As a side note, I rather surprisingly didn't see any wildlife, including the area's iconic Roosevelt elk (or Olympic elk). I did see plenty of elk tracks, however. Other hikers were writing entries on the elk observation log at the trailhead as well, so they were certainly out there.

I won't dwell too much here on the technical particulars of my images. In all of the images in this post, I used narrow apertures to achieve wide depths of field; this ended up requiring some patience, as the long shutter speeds that I used under tree cover meant that I frequently had to wait for a breeze to die down.

We'll start out with a big ol' Sitka spruce trunk, along with some vine maple leaves in both the foreground and background.

Next is row of old trunks typical of trees that began growth on a nurse log; the tangle of roots and the alignment persist long after the fallen tree has rotten away.

Here's a view of some various varieties of ferns with the mossy forest in the background.

The next two show bigleaf maple festooned with mosses. I wasn't so sure about the second one compositionally-  I just don't know if it's all that interesting - but I like it better here on the computer than I did on the camera screen. The maples look somewhat ghostly with all the moss.

Another forest landscape:

Finally, something a bit different: A view up, during a brief period of afternoon sunshine, at the trunks of Sitka spruce and western hemlock. The contrast made this one tricky to pull off; I had to wait until there was a minimum of clouds in the frame, as they were hard to avoid overexposing.

Coming soon: Sol Duc Falls!