Washington Mountain Images and Prints
Some pages are under constructiion, this page especially...
For nearly one hundred and fifty miles north of the Columbia River Gorge, the Washington Cascades pretty much resemble the Oregon Cascades,--forested hills punctuated by glaciated volcanos. North of Mt. Rainier, however, the Cascades become higher, more rugged, more glaciated. There are still volcanos such as remote Glacier Peak and accessible Mt. Baker, but now instead of forested hills there is a sea of craggy, extensively glaciated summits composed of non-volcanic, crystalline rocks like gneiss, granite, and greenstone--peaks like Mt. Shuksan, Bonanza Peak (highest non-volcanic mountain in the state), Eldorado Peak, Dome Peak, Mt. Challenger, Forbidden Peak, Mt. Formidable, and Mt. Stuart. In North Cascade National Park and the adjacent Glacier Peak Wilderness (certainly the most alpine terrain in the lower forty-eight), it is possible for climbers to make high level traverses over glaciers and high passes, never dropping below timberline for days. Washington, in my opinion, has the best mountains in the country. This would be true even if the state did not also have the Olympic Range with stunning rain forests and by far the most extensive system of low elevation glaciers near the Pacific Ocean anywhere south of Canada.
Best of all, much of it--North Cascade National Park, for example--is "managed" as wilderness, as remote and inaccessible as it gets south of Canada. The downside here is that the inaccessibility and the weather combine to make these locations also the most difficult and challenging mountains in the country to photograph. Packing large format camera equipment into these mountains is not for the arthritic.
