Taking the North Cascades Highway Home

My last day of adventure started along the shores of Banks Lake not far from Steamboat Rock. Here we find a small quiet pool reflecting the rocky cliff above it.



After passing through Electric City, I stopped to take a photo of Lake Roosevelt to get a view of the upstream side of the Grand Coulee Dam. I think the large booms across the water are there to keep debris from clogging the turbine intakes.

Once past the the town of Grand Coulee, the Columbia River fills a picturesque valley.

Up the road a ways we come to the themed town of Winthrop. While Leavenworth's theme is Bavaria, Winthrop has chosen to be a town from the old west. Even the sidewalks are wooden.

After leaving Winthrop, the climb starts, reaching its peak at nearly 5500 feet at Washington Pass. This far north and at this altitude, we still find lots of snow on the peaks and even the remains of the piles of plowed snow at the roadside in places.

Up at the top of one section of the mountains is a long section of the peaks that are still snow covered. I took a photo using the X-H1 and the 100-400mm lens. This is only image from the whole trip take with this camera. Just a reminder that even smaller cameras can still do the job.

One of the money shots was the view back down the valley I had just driven through. At the bottom of the valley was a rushing river that was quite loud, even from where I stood several hundred feet above.

Facing away from the long valley, we see the Early Winter Spires, two granite peaks that thrust up toward the sky in a dramatic fashion.

With only a very few minor inflections, from Washington Pass to Snohomish, it is downhill all the way. For the next 45 minutes or hour, I hardly touched the accelerator as we coasted down to the overlook at Diablo Lake.

While this would be a nicer view with more snow, with a bit of white at the peaks in the distance, it was still a nice place to stop and have a look. This lake is created by dam for hydroelectric power. The outlet of this lake eventually becomes the Skagit River. On a much lower portion of this river is where we had our Eagle watching cruise back in early December.

As the road continued down hill, I found this stream by the roadside that made a nice image.

Much lower down the mountain, we come to the a gorge where we find Gorge Lake, another man-made lake on the Skagit. Flowing nearly vertically from a high point beyond where I could see, is Gorge Creek.

Toward the lake is a path with a lookout or two and nice section of woodland.

Just for fun (not because the composition is great), I took this photo of another creek flowing into Gorge Creek. The stream is location across the way while the framing moss covered rock and tree are much closer. The tree I could reach out and touch. To get it all in focus, I use a feature on the GFX to create a focus stack and then assembled them in software. By taking 14 images, each with the focal point shifted between the tree and the distant waterfall, I was able to create an image with all bits in focus even though the aperture was relatively wide open. Lacking Ansel Adam's 8x10 view camera and the ability to use f/64 to get depth of field, this is how it is done. This is how commercial photographers get those close-up images of jewelry with all parts of it in perfect focus.

After this is was just a drive home. The closer I got to home, the worse the traffic got and slow it went. After leaving the motel at 6:45 I reached home about 4:00. A long day of driving, but meany fun sights to see. I'll certainly do this again.