Pearrygin Lake State Park

Author's Comments

The Methow Valley sits in a particular kind of light that does not exist on the wet side of the mountains. It is drier, harder, more honest. The pines are spaced in a way that lets the light through, and the hills above the lake go gold in late August in a way that reminds me more of the interior West than of Washington. Pearrygin is a working park. Families, swimmers, the kind of camping that involves coolers and folding chairs. I do not mean that as a complaint. It means that in the early hours and the last hour of the day, when the day-use crowd has settled or scattered, the lake belongs to whoever is willing to wait for it. The North Cascades sit on the western horizon, and at sunset they go from blue to violet to something almost black, and the lake holds the color in reverse below them. Stay for the night sky. That is the real reason to come. Winthrop is small and far from anything, and the stars over the eastern foothills are the kind I associate with the desert Southwest rather than the Pacific Northwest. A new moon in September, the Milky Way still arcing high in the early evening, the pines dark against it. I have made photographs here that I could not have made an hour west of the pass. It is not a dramatic park. It is a quiet one, and it rewards the photographer who is willing to be patient with a landscape that does not announce itself.

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