Artist Point and Mount Shuksan

Author's Comments

Shuksan is the mountain that has done more modeling than most mountains ever will. You have seen it in advertisements without knowing you were seeing it, standing in for somewhere in Switzerland or Austria, its glaciers and jagged summit blocks arranged behind Picture Lake as if the whole scene had been designed rather than found. The strange thing is that in person it does not feel overexposed. It still lands. The window is narrow. The road opens sometime in mid to late July depending on snowpack, and closes with the first serious storm in October, which gives you maybe twelve weeks to work with. I have come in early August when the heather is still green and the snowfields run high on the peaks, and I have come in the last week of September when the meadows have gone crimson and gold and the whole basin looks like it is burning quietly from below. The fall version is the one I keep returning for. Picture Lake is the postcard, and evening is the hour. Mornings the wind picks up and the surface breaks, and the reflection you drove three hours for turns into abstract chop. But an hour before sunset the water usually stills, and Shuksan catches the last warm light while the lake goes into shadow, which is the exact contrast the photograph needs. Walk the loop around the lake before you set up. There are three or four compositions and the obvious one is not always the best. Up at Artist Point proper, turn away from Shuksan and give Baker its due. It is a different photograph entirely. Wider, quieter, more volcano than alpine cathedral, and almost no one is pointing a camera at it.

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