Blue Lake (North Cascades)

Author's Comments

There is a particular kind of hidden place that hides in plain sight, and Blue Lake is one of them. The trailhead sits right off Highway 20, the parking lot fills by midmorning in October, and yet the lake itself somehow retains the feeling of somewhere you have stumbled into rather than driven to. Maybe it is the elevation. Maybe it is the way the trail climbs through subalpine meadow and then opens, almost without warning, onto water held in a bowl of granite. The larches are the reason most people come in autumn, and they should. There is a week, sometimes ten days, when the needles turn the color of struck brass and the contrast against the pale granite of Liberty Bell and the Early Winters Spires becomes almost too much to photograph honestly. I have tried. The image always wants to be more saturated than the eye remembers. The trick, I have found, is to come at first light, before the sun crests the ridge and the lake is still in shadow. The reflection holds longest then. The wind has not yet started. The larches glow on the upper slopes while the water below stays dark and mirror-flat, and the photograph becomes about the line between the two. In summer the meadows are full of heather and the lake reads bluer, but autumn is when this place earns its name in a different register entirely. Check the snow. The trail can hold drifts into July at the upper switchbacks. Bring a longer lens than the wide one you will reach for first.

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