Hurricane Ridge

Author's Comments

You drive up from Port Angeles in the dark if you are serious about the morning light, and the road climbs through fog that you do not entirely escape until the last mile. Then the trees thin, the ridge opens, and on a clear morning the Olympics are simply there, rank after rank of them, with Mount Olympus holding the far distance under whatever snow has not yet melted. It is a view that does not really need your help. That is the problem with photographing Hurricane Ridge. The wide shot is a given, and a thousand people will make it this week, and most of those photographs will look approximately the same. The picture I keep working toward is smaller. Late July, the lupine and paintbrush are out in the meadows below the visitor center, and a black-tailed deer will often wander through the wildflowers in the slow hour after sunrise. Get low. Let the flowers carry the foreground and the mountains fall away behind, slightly soft. That is the frame. Golden hour here is genuinely golden in a way that lower elevations rarely manage. The light at 5,000 feet is cleaner, the shadows on the ridges deeper, and the layers of mountain behind mountain go from blue to bluer to almost white at the horizon. Stay through sunset if the sky is doing anything at all. Most visitors leave by six, and the ridge in the last hour of light belongs to the few who waited. In winter, when the road opens on weekends, the meadows go silent under snow and the photograph becomes something else entirely. Quieter. Less generous. Worth the drive on its own terms.

Gallery