The End of Columbia River Gorge Photography: Part III

If you haven't had a chance to read Parts I and II yet, you can do so by clicking the links below.

Part I

Part II

This little Anna's hummingbird stayed still long enough for me to play with the lighting and background.

They had a bird show at the museum. This unfortunate great horned owl got in an accident and wound up with a buggered eye. I tried to remove the bad red-eye effect from the owl, so it doesn't quite look like it should. 

This is the American kestrel at the show.

Isn't he gorgeous? This is the most brightly coloured raptor in North America.

Another gopher snake, and not a minute too soon! I was beginning to miss their grace and beauty (think of my sorry, deprived state now). They are the most beautiful snake, in appearance and in character, that I have ever seen. Just look at the patterns on his head! I wanted to take this one home. 

He's so photogenic! I was truly, and completely in love with this one.

Above and at left are some of the goose families at the lake by the campground. The always have such beautiful plumage, so I started clicking away with all sorts of angles. Below is another sort of family; buffleheads.

A goose family on their way back to the water after a lovely evening of feeding. Lead the way, Mom!

This beetle walked in a most curious fashion, with its abdomen angled skyward. I wonder if it is a dew-catching adaptation, like the beetle featured on Austen Steven's Namib Desert film.

Stay tuned for the last installment of The End of Columbia River Gorge Photography: Part IV

May 10, 2013 Part 2

Columbia River Gorge, Day 2B:

Once part of an old post called, Columbia River Gorge, Day 2, this is the second half of the second day I spent in the Columbia River Gorge back in the 2013 spring. Because of compatability issues with my new format, I had to rework this content, but I've enjoyed looking over it again. I encourage you to go back and read Day 2A (and Day 1) first.
For the second half of the day we explored the waterfalls of the temperate rainforest which plummet into the Columbia River. One of the first we stopped at was Horsetail Falls and, while it was difficult to get a good vantage point on the falls that would exclude humanity from the shot, I did get some beautiful shots of my family on the picturesque wall before the falls. The Upper Horsetail Falls, or Ponytail falls, are accessible by trail. We didn't hike to see that.

Horsetail Falls.

Multinomah Falls.

Top half of Multinomah
Falls.

Next was the famous Multinomah Falls with the classic bridge arching across the centre cascade. There were many people at the falls so it was inevitable that some pink shirts appear on the bridge in my shot. There is a trail that winds up the right side of the falls and permits one to stand on the bridge. This provided some great photo opportunities and made up for the crowded view down below. Multinomah is the tallest fall in Oregon at a total of about 620 feet.

Lataourell Falls.

Shepperd's Dell
Falls

Sheppard's Dell from a
different angle.

Honeysuckle. There are a variety of
wildflowers in the rainforest too.

Candy flower.

The Bridal Veil.

Closer to Bridal
Veil Falls.

W also stopped at the spectacular Latourell Falls. This was probably my favourite of the falls since it was the only one that truly dropped the whole distance (249 feet) without touching a stone. The curving rock walls behind the falls provide an epic backdrop to the volcanic natural history of the area. In some places, the basalt forms columns.

Some species of forget-me-not I
think.

Shepperd's Dell Falls was also difficult to photograph but I managed two good shots. One of these, higher up on the short trail to the falls, had a curious mossy curved branch which framed the falls splendidly, almost as if it had been put there on purpose. I wonder how many other hundreds of visitors have taken that exact shot.

Me at the Bridal Veil.

Roadkill pacific aquatic garter snake.

Our last stop today was Bridal Veil Falls. By then, it being late in the day, I had already suffered a pretty serious overdose of waterfall photography and not much was making me "wow" anymore. When I got to Bridal Veil, I started trying all kinds of crazy pictures and angles on the falls. I even had my brother take a picture of me at its base. Certainly it wasn't the most spectacular fall we'd seen, but it was probably the most photographed. On our way back to the car I came across another dead snake on the road. Once again, it was a species I'd never seen before in my life; the pacific coast aquatic garter snake. This was a major disappointment. Why are all the rare snakes roadkill? Maybe I'll have more blessing with snakes tomorrow.

An interesting angle on Bridal Veil Falls that illustrates the lush nature of the rainforest better than the nature of the falls themselves.

PHOTO OF THE WEEK: Crater Lake National Park

Crater Lake, in southwest Oregon, is well known for its shockingly blue waters. I was there to take this picture on June 8th of 2013, just as the snow was finishing its melt. Although the lake certainly looks like a crater, it wasn't formed by any extraterrestrial impact. Rather, this is the sunken hole that was once the top of a 3,400 meter high mountain. Now, all that remains is a caldera about 1,200 meters deep. The lake itself, at 592 meters, is in fact the deepest lake in the United States, with crystal clear waters reaching down toward the ancient volcanoes core.
So what happened? It seems that, following the global flood of Noah's days, the mountain began to grow in the continental unrest of the time. The continents were brand new and hadn't yet recovered from the their catastrophic division. During the Ice Age, glaciers dominated the area. However, pyroclastic lava flows issued from the growing dome and added to its flanks. As the earth started to warm and the climate became more stable, Mount Mazama grew less stable. Humans had colonized North America by this time, likely having come over the bearing straight on ice sheets during the Ice Age, they witnessed the earth-shattering explosion as Mazama blew its top -- literally. As nearly 1,700,000 square kilometres of North America darkened in an expanding blanket of ash, the local Klamath nation could only imagine that it was the result of some battle of the gods.
However, this is no home to some Llao god of the underworld but a testament to the power of the one true God. What the Klamath thought was a great struggle between good and evil (Skell and Llao) was only a fading reminder of the judgment of a single righteous God on mankind for their wickedness. How quickly we forget.

PHOTO OF THE WEEK: California Bighorn Sheep

They were the first Ovis canadensis I'd seen in the wild. It was May 12, 2012 and a herd was moving adjacent to a highway in Oregon. There were many bulls in the herd and this fellow meandered close enough to make a nice photo in the high light of the mid-day sun. Readers will be glad to know that I have arrived back home in Canada. That being said, I now have access to my old photo archives so pictures can go far back. This one is just from last year.

May 10, 2013 Part 1

Columbia River Gorge, Day 2A:

Only her bulging eyes
hint at the pain this
snake feels after
being hit by a car.

The California Mountain Kingsnake. The only one I've
ever found. It's a shame it will almost certainly be dead
shortly.

Fence lizard on a fence. Living up
to his name.

This morning we left camp early to go searching for reptiles at Catherine Creek, on the Washington side of the gorge. On the way there, my Dad spotted a snake on the road, so we pulled over and a couple of us ran back to see what if Dad's guess of California mountain kingsnake was right. It was but, sadly, the reptile had already been hit by a car and was close to death. Externally, she appeared fine but the only movements she could make were slow writhing shoves of her coils. I gently moved her off the road, but I doubted she would live another hour. She was probably the most beautiful snake I'd seen up to that point, and its sad that it had to be a roadkill specimen.

Fence lizard on rock, not living up to
his name.

Do you think she's pregnant? This
ground squirrel's teats were swollen.

Driving on from there to the trailhead parking lot, we pulled out our "snake sticks" and trekked out poking our improvised paint rollers into holes and under logs. Soon, we were catching southern alligator lizards and fence lizards around the creek's edge.
We stopped for lunch at a large pile of timber and watched a large male fence lizard do pushups on the highest plank to impress his females. It was pretty impressive. A ground squirrel soon showed up on the stack as well. It almost seemed like she was trying to stalk the lizards. She would have taken food from us I think if we had given her any. Daniel, my brother, tried catching the male fence lizard but he was outwitted.
I was beginning to think we wouldn't see any living snakes today but, thankfully, that proved to be wrong. My brother, moving ahead while we finished lunch, soon made up for his humiliating experience with the fence lizard. Calling, he alerted us to a gopher snake that was crossing the path. Gopher snakes are a species that one really cannot get enough of. They have beautiful faces and beautiful personalities, and are extremely photogenic. I took plenty of pictures and handled it a little, but it seemed to be fairly aggressive for a gopher snake. It mustn't have liked my camera.

Isn't that the most beautiful face you've ever seen? I'm not sure what subspecies of gopher snake these are. They might even be hybrids between the pacific and great basin subspecies.

He's saying, "I'll bite you if you come any closer!" Of course, it's just a bluff. I picked him up and he didn't follow through.

Only a short ways further I caught a second gopher snake and this one was really cranky. Striking at my lens and lunging at the family when they got too close. It is amazing how each snake has it's own personality. They certainly aren't programmed robots. They are individuals with their own likes and dislikes. Though I was hoping for a more complacent individual, it's nice to see some good, old-fashioned fear of people in these two snakes.

Lupines in a pine grove.

This gopher snake was pretty cranky.

Can anyone tell me what kind of
wildflower this is?

More lupines.

The trail led us into a beautiful grove of deciduous trees and a variety of wildflowers sprang up from the grasses. It was a beautiful place and I employed my camera on the purples of the wildflowers. And nearly all of them were a shade of purple! I photographed lupines, paintbrush, blue-eyed grass (I think) and other species that I couldn't identify. One of the flowers had a pretty little flower longhorn beetle on it. While the young of this species bore into trees and feed on the wood, the adults enjoy feeding on the pollen and nectar of flowers.

This is a flower longhorn beetle on an
unidentified wildflower.

This must be an alpine paintbrush.

Mount Hood stands out behind the
Columbia River Gorge.

After some time of beating around in the lush forests in the Catherine Creek valley, the trail carried us out onto a bare hill for a better look at the at the Columbia River Gorge. It was amazing to think that, as we stood there in the blistering heat of the hill with only a few scant and withered pines around us, that we had just come out of a relatively lush forest. Looking toward Mount Hood and its frozen Eliot Glacier my eyes drifted down into the temperate rainforest that surounds the mountain and finally to the rocky basalt shores of the Columbia River. So much diversity in such a short span of distance.

Florescent lichen.

There was a beautiful piece of lichen on an old sun-dried pine log on the hill and, though I tried, I couldn't seem to capture exactly how brilliantly florescent it was with my camera.

A tiny taste of things to come.

The trail led us back into the valley shortly and I took a few more wildflower pictures and practiced using slow shutter speeds with my camera on water. The mossy rock amid the foaming stream made a nice shot, but scarcely compares to our next destination today.
Because of formatting issues with my new blog design, this post has been split into two new posts this one, and Day 2B, here.

May 9, 2013

Columbia River Gorge, Day 1:

I find wildflowers, especially poppies, irresistible for my lens. These were in a field outside of Fort Vancouver.

Amazing how styles and preferences, even manners, change over time. Just look at the bright colours inside the room photographed below.

The interiors of these buildings
would look out of place anywhere
but a historic site. In the above
photo a beautiful wood-carved
stairway decorates the building of a
particularilly notable soldier for
which the Marshal Plan is named.

Old wood stoves used for baking.

These starlings where seen jammed
into all the nooks and crannies of the
watchtower.

The canon seems to be aimed at one of
the fort's own buildings.

It's nice to be back in the northwest. For the most part, today was a day of tourism as we visited various historic sites. Our first stop was fort Vancouver. As I stood within the large wooden walls of the fort and observed the displays that illustrated the different artifacts that could be dug up from the different eras of this region, from early emigrant artifacts of those natives who crossed over the Bearing Strait during the Ice Age to the discarded brochures lying on the modern surface. My mind turned from civilization to the starling on the wall, singing gleefully, and I thought back to those days when mammoths roamed the hills below the local glacial wall. Now the introduced and rather invasive starling is the predominant animal. I can't say I mind them, though. They have almost become a part of suburban culture and I don't mind them at all as long as they stay suburban.

The above two photos are of the
watchtowers.

We viewed some of the buildings used for military housing on the local street and then explored the fort itself with its canons and watchtowers. Despite these preparations, the fort never saw battle historically. The blacksmith told us that the place was primarily a pivotal place for the fur trade (that greedy and wasteful business that seems to have gotten North America its start). That doesn't mean it wasn't a harsh world though, as the re-enactor informed us. Every kid in the town carried a long knife and an ax with him and he was often sent alone into the forest for foraging or hunting. Those tools would come in handy if he wound up spending the night away from home in indian country.

Most food, thankfully, was harvested at the fort's European-style gardens. This too had been recreated by the volunteers at the fort and they grew various fruit, herbs, and spices. It was this practice of early colonizers that resulted in so many introduced species present in North America today. Like starlings.

There were also some native birds at the fort, including a lively sparrow near the fields of wildflowers. At first he sang, but as I crept closer for a photograph, he flitted away to a farther fence post. Still made a decent picture though (check it out on the left).

The photo on the left is of my brother demonstrating an intelligent tourist practice.

On our way to the next site, we stopped at a glorious view of the gorge. Swallows and swifts darted round the cliff below us and turkey vultures soared overhead. Someone jokingly stated that somebody must have fallen off the cliff and that is why the vultures are circling. Well, after noting how precariously some of our members stumbled around the meridians and teetered on the cliffs edge, I wonder if that saying isn't at least a little likely. Just kidding. The vultures just enjoy the updrafts from the valley below.

It's a stunning view from Beacon Rock.

One cannot have too many
wildflower photos. Even these
unobtrusive yellow ones are
delicately pretty. 

We arrived at Beacon Rock, there was a little confusion as to where the trail to the top was. We trekked out on the wrong trail for a minute before realizing that the one we really wanted was just around a bend in the rode. It proved to be an exciting hike with a good view. A great way to get used to being with the family again after a long winter. The rock itself is 848 feet above the Columbia River; a bit of a climb for the less-fit members of the family. Besides the view, a few animals were seen, including a clever Stellar's jay who was obviously used to free handouts from hikers. Some say that the blue jay is more beautiful, but I don't think so. The Stellar's jay just has that "northwest" feel

The way up was a switch-back trail that climbed up the river-facing slope of the basalt cliff. Anyone who considered stepping over the railing was in for a surprise; 800 feet of sheer drop into the forest below. At one bend in the boardwalk, I found something on a ledge. "I caught a snake!" I called, and heads spun to see. It was just a little plastic cobra toy, though.
Tomorrow, we head to Catherine Creek and there we hope to find some real snakes. Stay tuned! (anyone?)
It's so nice to be back with my family in a place I can truly call home. As nice as Florida has been for the winter, nothing beats the colourful biodiversity of the northwest.
I am looking forward to see what tomorrow brings.