Hiking Mount Hood Meadows

 
My friend Jay and I took a trip up to Mount Hood Meadows, which is a ski resort during the winter but now is covered with a beautiful array of wildflowers. Here's some photographic evidence of our excursion, although be warned: most of it's in black and white due to poor lighting.

Jay, as you may know, is the lead guitarist in our band, One Moment. Right now we're working on a CD (a Sam send-off before I head out to Washington DC for law school), and some of the tracks are online and available for listening, including my original City Love. Check it out here!

Mount Hood sunset

The Meadows and the Moon

The extra payoff: Umbrella Falls

Umbrella Falls

Yosemite Photos (Part II)

Many of the photos from the second full day at Yosemite are from the Mist Trail, one of the most popular hiking trails in Yosemite National Park if not the entire country, which takes you up the roaring Vernal Falls as it sprays you all over. If you so desire, which I did, you can continue on to Nevada Falls upriver. It is a trail that everyone who visits Yosemite should look into, even if the elevation gain is significant. The views are worth it. There's nothing like it in the world.

Now, I only mention this because this popular trail is the site of many deaths each year, usually due to people taking a dip in the Emerald Pool after the climb up Vernal Falls. It looks like a calm swimming hole just a hundred feet from the top of 360-foot Vernal Falls, and it sure looks enticing to cool off after that tough climb. But people die every year swimming in it and being pulled over the nearby waterfall.

I was disappointed in the lack of prominent signs near the area, especially since last year was such a particularly bad year for Vernal Falls deaths. In fact, we already have a death this year of a 19-year-old who was swept over Nevada Falls while swimming in what looked like a calm area.

Now I wonder: are people getting most of their hiking information from the internet? Sites like mine? And are those internet resources giving hikers fair warning about the dangers of swimming in the river above huge waterfalls, even if the river looks calm? Perhaps this is the reason last year was particularly tragic. So here goes, my duty as an oft-ignored blogger writing about the Mist Trail: Never ever swim above a waterfall! If you plan to go on this amazing hike - and you really should - plan on not swimming. Seriously, no matter how calm it is, no swimming in the Emerald Pool or anywhere close to the waterfall's edge.

Thank you, and now on to photos!

Half Dome sunrise

Vernal Falls: one of the world's most stunning falls, plus rainbow.

Vernal Falls detail

On the trail above Vernal Falls, just past the deadly Emerald Pool

From left to right: Half Dome from the back, Liberty Cap, and 597-foot tall Nevada Falls

Classic Vernal Falls view

View from the top of 360-foot tall Vernal Falls, plus double rainbow.

Half Dome lit up with sunset

Only the tip touched the sun

Merced River

Merced River reflection

Where the sidewalk ends: Mirror Lake is slowly becoming a meadow.

Our group that made it to the top of Nevada Falls: Enrique, Mona, Alison and Joel, Rebecca, Dad, Courtney, and Me

Courtney watches Vernal Falls

Us at Vernal Falls

Snowshoeing!

Last weekend I got my first ever taste of the strange and wonderful sport of snowshoeing. Courtney and I and a couple friends went on a guided hike through the Mount St. Helens wilderness on the way to a couple gorgeous views of the mountain and eventually to June Lake and the 74-foot waterfall that feeds it.

A couple of things about snowshoeing before I show the photos:

1. Snowshoes are not hard to walk in. They are long, wide, and flat, but in the snow they are the best for walking on lots of feet of snow. It feels like walking with your normal shoes. And there's quite a bit of agility when climbing or descending hills. 
2. In the mountains, we encountered something called "the inversion," which means it was warmer while hiking in the snow than it was in the Portland parking lot where we met our guide in the morning. In other words, while my friends in Portland were huddled under blankets and drinking tea in the fog, I was in my T-shirt snapping photos of a partially frozen lake while standing on who knows how many feet of snow. Breezes were as warm as summer. Wild, huh?
3. We had great snowshoeing conditions. Not much slippery ice as we may have expected, and a lot of the snow had been packed down by hikers before us making the trail easy to follow. Plus skies were as clear as could be.
4. Thanks to the high reflectivity of snow, photos were hard to come by. June Lake is tucked into the rocks just out of view of Mount St. Helens, and June Lake Falls was completely shaded when we stopped there for lunch. The contrast between the shade and direct sunshine on the snow is my excuse for not getting great shots. Compounding all this was my surprise at there being a waterfall at all - I hadn't come prepared with a tripod. 
5. But who cares about the lack of great shots? It was a blast!

So I hope you don't mind the double post day and enjoy double the photos for one day:

Courtney and I with Mount St. Helens behind us

Mount St. Helens view. If we kept going on the June Lake trail, eventually we'd make it to the top of the mountain. In fact, in the parking lot we met someone who had hiked that morning to the top of the mountain and skied down.

More Mount St. Helens. It's mountains.

On the trail to June Lake

Courtney's having fun

The shoes were easy to use, but only once we figured out how to put them on. We all needed some amount of help. That's our friend Rebecca in the front not needing any help.

June Lake and June Lake Falls. I didn't dare walk on the ice, though judging by those footprints there are those who did

Our group sits down for lunch. Now that I look, I guess I was the only one actually wearing nothing over my T-shirt. You can also see my shadow in this one.

A little bit of waterfall reflection. This is as close as I managed to get to the lake.

Our group eating lunch by the lake. From left to right: Rebecca, Emma, and Courtney.

More Photos: Elowah and Ponytail Falls

Elowah Falls

I took a trip out to the Columbia River Gorge with a photographer buddy of mine so we could catch optimal waterfall photography conditions, which typically occur hours before my friends are awake, let alone ready to drive out to the Gorge with me. Also it was cold enough to drive most people away, although just about all the ice from my last shoot had melted. All spelled out a good time for some waterfalling!

Our first stop was Dalton Point for the sunrise. The sky didn't light up as much as we thought it would, but I still had fun shooting westward.

Then we went to Elowah Falls, which is troublesome for photography. Climbing around here is one of the only ways to get a decent view. Still, the water is a little whitewashed here.

The trail to Ponytail Falls continues by curling around behind it. This time of year it was raging and there was no avoiding lens mist. Still, I've never taken a behind-the-waterfall shot I like nearly as much as this one.

Ponytail Falls (Upper Horsetail Falls) from the stream below.

The end of our excursion took us to a lookout just beyond Ponytail Falls. The contrast made a hard time of getting the hole Gorge in one shot, but this mountainous reflection shows a little of how majestic the view was.

One more of Ponytail Falls for the road

The Frosty Falls

Thanks to an impromptu call from a friend, I got a bonus trip to Multnomah Falls for a couple hours. Little did I know I was heading into winter wonderland, the waterfall surrounded by an amphitheater of white ice formations and plants encased in translucent sheathes. Besides the meteors in Crater Lake, this was probably the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in Oregon.

Still, it was not without danger. The trek to the Benson Bridge spanning above the lower tier of Multnomah Falls was slippery and slow going - in fact, access to the falls was restricted in general, although people had no qualms about stepping over the caution tape blocking the way. On the path past the bridge and heading to the top of the falls, we saw some people walking in the opposite direction who had passed us earlier on the way up. They said they had seen someone farther on the trail take a slip, and if he hadn't grabbed hold of a tree at the last moment he would have fallen off the face of the cliff. That's when we decided to head back.

But it was still so beautiful! Enjoy the photographic evidence below. And as far as top music of 2012 lists go (because I know none of you can wait), I'm still working on them. Be patient if you can!

Upper tier of the falls. I couldn't get too many pictures from this spot because of all the mist swirling around my lens. Here's a link to a photo taken a few days after this shot by someone who was able to keep his lens clear.

Classic view of the icy falls

With my new wide angle lens, I can easily fit the plaque and the top of the waterfall in the same shot.

Individually wrapped pine needles

The frozen log at the base of the lower tier

Twigs dripping with ice at the upper falls

A wide view of classic Multnomah

Walking from the parking lot to the falls

Close up on the upper tier

The base of the upper tier. That boulder on the right fell off the cliff in the 1970s, causing cold water and stones to rain on a wedding photo taking place on the bridge at the time. No one was seriously injured.

On the trail to the Benson Bridge

A 620-foor waterfall casually looks on