One of the great things about trail running is finding these places that feel like worlds unto themselves, where one can run forever and forget the hard reality of life off the trail.
There's no sign on the forest road that tells a person this trail exists; but if you climb up the hillside from the road and into the forest, you can hop on and run parallel to the road, through the forest, almost to the peak of Rock Candy Mtn.
The things you'll see when you leave traveled roads for barely discernible paths through the woods 😅🤩
I'm grateful I wasn't around when the windstorm brought down so many limbs in Waddell Basin, but I'm also glad I got to run thru before they were moved off the trail and out of sight. I love how some lichens look like terrestrial coral 🪸🧡
Often, I find that the only way to get truly interesting photos is to get myself into some uncomfortable position so that I can frame the shot in some quirky way; sometimes, though, nature just presents something that looks like a work of art entirely on its own, no creative framing necessary 🎨
When you've been running for a couple hours and you reach that sign deep in the forest reminding you that you have miles yet to go to get back to where you started 🏃♂️😅
This isn't one of my best captures—limitations of smartphone photography—but I'm sharing because I'd like to know if anyone else has seen something like this. Note that almost every limb of the subject tree is wavy. None of the tree's neighbors, all the same type of tree, had wavy branches like that. Knowing what I know about how trees grow, I can only guess that the shape of this tree's branches had something to do with the quality of light it was receiving as those limbs grew: how much light, the pattern of light and shadows cast by neighbors, etc. Any science hippies here in the Federation have any further insight to impart?
I'll never get tired of the sight of mist moving through the forest, nor will I tire of the blues and yellows of sunlight diffused by clouds on the horizon 💛💙💛
I wish I'd been closer—or that this capture had a high-enough resolution that I could zoom in further without noticeably reducing the quality of the image—but even though not ideal, I love what I caught 🐶💗
She looks so happy, and that front paw hovering over the trail is so flippin' cute! Adorable 😍
In my experience, these purple-pink phenotypes are much less common than white trillium in these parts (the forests of western Washington); I was very surprised, then, to find that almost half—by my very rough estimate—of all the trillium I saw on the Mima Falls Trail were this purple-pink color. When I got onto the McKenny Trail, the majority went clearly back to white. I wonder what it is about the Mima Falls Trail... 🤔