Washington Pass Overlook

Author's Comments

The first time I came up to Washington Pass it was late September and the larches had not yet turned, and I remember thinking the granite alone was almost enough. Liberty Bell rises from the valley below the overlook in a way that the road, even minutes earlier, does not prepare you for. The Early Winters Spires stack behind it like a second thought from the same hand. The trail to the viewpoint takes maybe ten minutes and ends at a stone wall built into the edge of the cliff, and the drop from there is real. But it is mid-October that earns the drive. The larches come in along the lower slopes and the avalanche chutes, and on a good year they turn the color of struck brass against the gray of the rock. The window is narrow. Maybe ten days. The pass road closes for winter not long after, and the difference between catching peak color and arriving a week late is the difference between a photograph and a memory of a photograph. I shoot wide here, almost always. The scale of the spires asks for it. But the detail work is worth your time too - the texture of weathered granite, a single larch holding light against shadow, the way the highway switchbacks below the overlook read as a pale ribbon when the sun gets low. Golden hour is the answer and it is not a subtle one. The west-facing rock takes warm light directly and goes from gray to something closer to amber for about twenty minutes before the valley falls into shadow. Be there for it. The drive back to Winthrop in the dark is part of the deal.

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