2 Months in the Pacific Northwest

Northwest Highlights

Here's a quick rundown of the highlights of our road trip in the PNW:

• Lassen Volcanic National Park: We camped a few nights at the Butte Lake Campground and enjoyed checking out the surreal volcanic landscapes around Cinder Cone.
• Mount Shasta: We did an easy one-night backpack trip above Castle Lake with a big view of Shasta, then spent a day hiking up into the granite playground of Castle Crags.
• Trinity Alps: During a heatwave we did a strenuous but wonderful 2-night backpack trip into the Trinity Alps. Very Sierra-esque with all the granite, and the waterfalls and swimming ponds were blissful!
• Redwoods: We spent a week camping and hiking in the majestic redwoods of California. Always magical.
• Oregon Coast: After the redwoods we continued up the southern Oregon coast, staying in campgrounds and doing little hikes to various beaches and coves.
• Bend: We had a fun visit with a friend of Claudia's in Bend and even caught a Broken Social Scene concert there!

• Mount Hood: As far as adventure goes, the highlight of the entire road trip was trekking the Timberline Trail around Mount Hood. We were blessed with excellent clear weather and it was such a pleasure to see the sunsets and dusk skies from high above everything else. We even got to watch the little blips of 4th of July fireworks in the distance around Portland.
• Chuckanut: We drove up towards Bellingham to spend a week in a rental house with my parents and sister (visiting from Sao Paulo!). Good fun, good food!
• Western Washington Cascades: I was super excited to do a backpack trip to Snowking Mountain, a peak I hiked nearly 25 years ago! Unfortunately the mosquitos were absolutely swarming up there, so after that we abandoned all our other July backpacking plans and opted to do a bunch of sunset hikes instead. Of all those, two particular highlights were an eye-popping sunset on Excelsior Ridge near Mount Baker, and the stunning view atop Vesper Peak.
• Squamish, BC: We spent a pleasant four days in Squamish visiting Claudia's family who were on vacation from Germany. No photos, unfortunately, as wildfire smoke drifted in most of the time.

Although predictable for July, the mosquitos were pretty annoying in Washington and dissuaded us from doing most of the backpacking adventures I'd hoped to do. We will just have to return someday in the autumn months when those skeeters are gone!

Wildfire Summer, Wildfire Future

At the end of June as we were camping and enjoying beautiful weather and clear skies in Oregon, we got word that a small wildfire had started back home in Colorado just north of Ouray. Over the next days we were horrified to see the Gold Mountain Fire explode into a massive inferno that ended up torching 40,000 acres of beloved mountains and trails between the towns of Ouray and Ridgway – everything between Bridge of Heaven to the Cimarrons was up in flames. Our friends were sending us apocalyptic images of mountainsides on fire and towering pyrocumulus clouds just a few miles from town.

Fortunately, the prevailing southwest winds were blowing the fire mostly away from town, so our house was theoretically not in imminent danger. But still we felt uneasy and possibly irresponsible to be off on a road trip while our home mountains burned, never quite knowing if the town would need to evacuate at some point.

Part of me kind of wished I was back home to witness (and photograph) the wildfire since it was such a momentous event in our small town's history. But the reality is that we were lucky to be away somewhere else enjoying clear skies while our town was smoky and apocalyptic. Numerous friends told me we should be glad we were away and not witnessing the devastation in person.

Within a few weeks, though, wildfires were popping off in eastern Oregon, Washington, and BC – which we pretty much already expected given the bone-dry forests after ~20% of average snowpack across the West this last winter.

In mid-July, while looking at the fire maps I noticed a small 17-acre fire east of Glacier Peak in the central Cascades in Washington. That one soon exploded into the Little Giant Fire which is still raging as I write this a month later, having consumed nearly 140,000 acres of prime mountain terrain by now. It was a bit odd hiking and camping with beautiful weather on the west side of the Cascade Crest, knowing that there were raging infernos happening just a few miles over on the other side of the mountains.

In late July we discovered that our favorite truck camping site of the entire trip – the epic site near Mount Hood pictured above – had burned up along with the entire mountain it's on, in the Grasshopper Fire which has now scorched over 90,000 acres east of Mount Hood. I guess we were among the last people to enjoy that campsite.

By early August it felt like wildfires and smoke were closing in on the small bubble of clear skies in western Washington, and combined with a general feeling of homesickness by then, the writing was on the wall that it was time to end our road trip and drive through all the smoke to get home.

All these wildfires and heatwaves almost have me thinking that perhaps the oceans and climate could be rapidly heating, and maybe – just maybe – that might have something to do with massive wildfires becoming more and more common every summer in the last decade. If only there were scientists out there studying the oceans and atmosphere who could have given us warnings about this exact scenario over the last 60 years... If only we had some sort of alternative energy technologies besides oil and gas which we could have developed into robust infrastructure decades ago...  🤔 🤦‍♂️   

Sarcasm aside, these are indeed difficult times for nature lovers (or anyone who gives a shit about the environment we live in) – getting battered on all sides from drought, heatwaves, and wildfires which seem to get worse and worse every summer; meanwhile we're stuck with a ruling kakistocracy hell bent on dismantling environmental protections and selling off our public lands. I've always thought of my nature photography as a celebration of the beauty of our world, but increasing I feel like it's unwittingly becoming a project of documenting places I love before they are destroyed. Just this summer alone a bunch of my photos have become historical artifacts.

Despite the accumulating losses and struggle to find optimism, I do think it's certainly still worthwhile to continue searching for peace and connection to nature, to continue exploring our world and finding beauty and adventure in wild places. Perhaps it's more important than ever.