Hurricane Ridge Olympic National Park

I finally made it to Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. I tried to get here the other day but as I drove up the mountain the clouds got so thick that I couldn’t see five feet in front of my car and the road is very windy. So, I wimped out and turned around. No such problem today. A few spots of driving through clouds but I could at least see the road and once I broke through the clouds everything was clear. There is a large parking lot at the visitor’s center at the top. The view is truly magnificent. One thing that I didn’t realize is that the Cascade Mountains are volcanic but the mountains on the Olympic Peninsula are pressure mountains. They have been formed by the plates coming together and forcing the sea floor up to as much as one mile above sea level. Just one small problem. There is a large fire in Canada somewhere and some of the smoke is being blown to the Olympic Peninsula and is causing a slight haze. It is the type of haze that is in the Smokey Mountains National Park all the time, except that haze is natural and not from a fire. I was one of the first ones to get up there and in the meadow next to the visitor’s center there was a herd of black tailed deer. I got some images of them with the snow-capped mountains in the background. It was amazing that these deer seem to be so used to people that they didn’t run. One of them was eating grass and even walked toward me. I have read enough signs in the national parks that the closer the deer came the further I moved back. The haze was a slight problem, but I used my circular polarizer to cut through it some and then used the dehaze slide bar in Lightroom to cut through even more. I walked around one of the paved trails to get some different views of the mountains. While is was walking there were two chipmunks playing. One of them even did me a favor a climbed up a small pine tree that was about eighteen inches high and posed for me. I tipped him an acorn. When I left Hurricane Ridge, I went to Port Townsend. This is a town built in the early 1900’s to compete with Seattle as a port city. It didn’t work out, but they have done a remarkable job of preserving the buildings and architecture.