So long to the Pacific Northwest
Hard to hike far in the Northwest without coming across spectacular unnamed cascades such as this one near Glacier, WA.
After spending the first 18 years of my life in Arizona, moving to the Pacific Northwest for college was a bit of a change for me climatically. Even living on the “dry” eastern side of Washington, I couldn’t believe how the clouds could so easily stick around for weeks on end. Relocating to one of the cloudiest cities in the country two years ago was even more of an adjustment. Somehow I had gone from 300 days of sun to 300 days of clouds in just four short years (but also from 0.85 to 3.60 breweries per 100,000 people so there’s that…). Now, after six years in the Pacific Northwest (punctuated by a few summers on the Colorado Plateau), I’m trading the Cascades for the Rockies and moving to sunnier climes in Colorado!
Mule’s Ears on Kamiak Butte in Eastern Washington.
The Northwest is home to some fantastically diverse and photogenic landscapes, perhaps more so than any other part of the country I’ve spent time in. In Washington alone you can find sand dunes, waterfalls, and prairies amongst the rolling hills of Eastern Washington, jagged sea cliffs and pastoral farmlands along the coast in the San Juan Islands, and glacier capped peaks and rainforests so lush you swear you’ve been transported to the Amazon in the Cascades and on the Olympic Peninsula. I figured now was a good time to share some photos that represent this amazing diversity and reflect a bit on my time in the Northwest.
A spawning pink salmon on the South Fork of the Nooksack River takes its final breaths.
What really epitomizes the Northwest for me is the abundance of one of the most common substances in the Universe: water. Whereas in the Southwest water is hard to find, in the Northwest it is difficult to escape. Whether on the coast, in the foothills, or in the mountains, water is never far away, be it saltwater, freshwater, glacier water, or rain water. While backpacking in the Northwest, you can almost always count on coming across a stream every few miles to replenish your supplies (unless you’re hiking around and active volcano, as I unpleasantly learned a few years back), a welcome change from carrying 8 pound gallon jugs on your back. Prolonged droughts and water restrictions, a way of life for decades in the Southwest, are near unheard of in the Northwest. Large dams in the Northwest are being removed and reservoirs drained, something that would be a cardinal sin to even think about in the arid Colorado River Basin, lest we lose even a few drops of precious water. Major rivers in the Northwest actually reach the sea, rather than being sucked dry in the desert, a la the Colorado.
At the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival
It is this abundance of water in its many forms that makes the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest what they are. Case in point: here in the mountains of Colorado, we have peaks higher than any in the Cascades and temperatures just as cold (if not colder), yet the glacier score is Washington: 3101, Colorado: 141. As I write this from my computer in Western Colorado, a few small drops of rain are beginning to fall from a storm cloud overhead and my neighbors are gathering to comment on the spectacle. This phenomenon sums up the difference between the Southwest and Northwest perhaps more succinctly than any prose I could ever write.
More photos from my Northwest adventures will be forthcoming since I have a huge backlog of images waiting for me to think of something moderately interesting to write about. Aside from that, plan on becoming much more familiar with the landscapes of the Rocky Mountains in the coming years as I explore my new (and drier) home!
Sunset across the Palouse Hills outside of Pullman, WA
Low tide at Salt Creek Recreation Area on the Olympic Peninsula.
A common coastline critter in the PNW: the red rock crab.
I call this piece “Slug Climbing Stairs”
Curious goats at Hovander Park in Ferndale, WA
Capturing Cosmic Dust with a Camera: the Zodiacal Light
Cameras can be strange machines. We tend to think of cameras as devices that faithfully record the nature of the landscape around us, which they do…at least most of the time. When this paradigm does break down, it is usually because the camera has failed to record something important, something that made a moment or an experience worth remembering. Oftentimes when this happens, we become disappointed. How many times have you been scrolling through vacation photos and lamented at how poorly they turned out? Sometimes we even realize the limitations of the camera in the moment itself. Perhaps you’ve experienced something akin to standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon at sunset and becoming so resigned to the fact that no photograph will ever satisfactorily capture the grandeur in front of you that you begin to ponder the option of chucking your camera into the great chasm below.
On rare occasions though, the camera delights us by managing to capture even MORE than meets the eye. After returning from a recent camping trip to the San Juan Islands in northwest Washington, I was surprised to find an unexpected apparition in some of the long-exposure photographs I took from our campsite on the west coast of San Juan Island.
Getting to the San Juans is no easy task; it took me about 5 hours to get there, even though “there” is just 35 miles by air from my front doorstep. As a result, the islands can feel remote and isolated, but standing along the coast at night is a not so gentle reminder that you’re actually only about eight miles across the Haro Strait from Victoria, a metro area of more than 300,000 people. Taking advantage of a somewhat rare, perfectly clear Pacific Northwest evening, I took a series of 15 second exposures looking west across the strait which I composted into this 180 degree panorama:
Click photo to embiggen!
The first thing you notice is the egregious light pollution from Victoria. Even the skyglow from Vancouver, five times further away but seven times more populous, is visible through the tress. Amongst all of the artificial light sources though, some natural ones still manage to shine through. The faint tendrils of the winter Milky Way just barely register on the camera’s sensor but the bright winter constellations of Orion, Canis Major, and Taurus forcefully punch their way through. If you look really closely, you’ll see a faint, slightly elongated, pale blue glow hiding in-between the lights of Victoria and Sidney. This is a phenomenon known as the zodiacal light, and it’s what took me by surprise when I started putting these images together. Here’s an annotated version to help you out:
See it? It’s a slightly different color than the light domes and isn’t as round and symmetrical as the light radiating from the cities, but rather looks squished and creeps upward into the sky at an angle. What really betrays the nature of this mysterious glow is its location: it coincides almost perfectly with the ecliptic, the plane of our solar system which is also the apparent path that the Sun, Moon, and planets follow as they move across the night sky.
What does this have to do with the zodiacal light? Well, it turns out that the plane of our solar system is home to lots and lots of dust. Not the dust made of dead skin cells and carpet fuzz you find around your house, but rather interplanetary dust particles made mostly of carbon, silicon, and oxygen. These dust particles are really small, on the order of 10 micrometers in diameter, about the size of a mold spore. The exact source of this dust is controversial; most of it is thought to be the result of collisions between comets and asteroids although some may be leftover from the formation of the solar system itself, tiny pieces of debris that never got incorporated into a planet. Regardless of where it cam from, the dust is really good at reflecting sunlight. Just after sunset (or just prior to sunrise), the angle between the Sun, dust, and Earth is such that the light reflected of the surfaces of the innumerable dust particles reaches our eyes (or cameras) here on Earth, giving rise to the zodiacal light.
When you consider how small the dust is (and that the dust particles are on average more than 2 miles apart from one another!), it’s not hard to understand why the zodiacal light is so faint and difficult to spot. Due to a quirk of celestial geometry, spring is a great time to observe it from the northern hemisphere, but even then spotting it with the naked eye requires extremely dark skies. The conditions in the San Juans, while darker than many spots in Western Washington, are far too light polluted. However, digital cameras are MUCH more sensitive to faint sources of light than the human eye. It’s actually rather common for a camera to detect things in the night sky that aren’t visible otherwise. On the night I saw the aurora borealis for the first time about a year and a half ago, its presence was first betrayed to me as a faint green glow hugging the horizon on my camera’s LCD screen, hours before it became bright enough to see with the naked eye. If not for my camera’s ability to detect it, I would have been fast asleep instead of standing in a marshy field near the Canadian border when the aurora dramatically brightened a few hours later and streamers began appearing all over the sky.
Have you ever captured anything on camera that you found surprising? Share your thoughts or stories in the comments below.
Snails of a Different Color
Up until a few days ago, I would have felt extremely confident saying that I’ve seen more fossilized sea snails in my life than I have real ones. After all, teaching a lab that revolves around sedimentary rocks for two quarters will put one in close contact with more dead gastropods than one ever thought possible. And when you spend a lot of time staring at multi-million-year-old fossils, it’s often easy to forget that lots of the little buggers have closely related relatives still trolling the high seas today.
Just a few of the many, many, MANY different colored and patterned varieties of nucella lamellosa, the Frilled Dogwinkle
A few days ago though, I stumbled upon a sea snail breeding ground of epic proportions at a place called Point Whitehorn Marine Reserve. I had gone there with the express purpose of looking at rocks and I remain convinced that the snails made their dramatic appearance in order to force me to confront the inherent irony in going to a marine reserve to look at rocks. Near the low-tide line, a couple of bright orange striped shells grabbed my attention, sticking out marine creamsicles amidst the backdrop of drab green algae and seaweed, dull brown barnacles, and grey sky reflected in the waves. I soon realized that I was surrounded (in a benign and not even remotely threatening way) by hundreds upon hundreds of sea snails exhibiting a dazzling array of different colors and patterns.
Now, my knowledge of sea snail taxonomy is limited, but it appears that despite the disparate appearance of these snails, they are all part of the same species: nucella lamellosa, also known as the Frilled Dogwinkle or Frilled Whelk (if anyone has information to the contrary, please let me know). Most of the snails in these photos are smooth; they have lost their ridges or frills that normally run along the length of their shell. This is apparently a common fate of nucella lamellosa that choose to spend their lives in places like Pt. Whitehorn which experience very rough surf during the winter. The frills literally get worn away, not at all surprising when you consider that the shells are made out of calcium carbonate, a substance that in it’s crystalline form is only a we bit harder than drywall.
Purple was the rarest color I encountered; orange, black, grey, and pure white seemed to be the most prevalent.
Many rocks were encrusted with dozens of the snails, varying in size from babies barely larger than a pea, to a few gargantuan snails nearly four inches long. This species hatches in late winter and early spring, so this is a good time to get a sneak peak at the next generation. A female sea snail can apparently lay thousands of eggs each year, although like most species who opt for quantity over quality when it comes to reproduction, only a small percentage survive to adulthood. In the case of nucella lamellosa, that number is estimated at a paltry 1%. Upon reading this, I realized in horror that the occasional sharp “crunch” heard from underneath my boots while I was taking these photographs was nothing other than the sound of my contribution to this rather depressing and morbid statistic. But with any luck, those shell fragments I (inadvertently) created will get weathered, transported, buried, and fossilized, eventually re-surfacing in the collection of some enterprising geologist a few million years from now, a fate that can only be described as THE ultimate honor for any ambitious gastropod.
The only decent shot I got of the innards of these snails.
A handful of the less gaudy looking but substantially larger snails. The largest one here is almost three inches long.
A variety six-pack of nucella lamellosa munching on some barnacles.
Zach Schierl Photography 