Twelve Months on Hurricane Ridge Begins

January 1, 2025. Practice typing 2025 instead of 2024. A new year. A new book. Actually, a new photo essay. Twelve Months on Hurricane Ridge, a place that provides panoramas of the heart of the Olympic Mountain Range, assuming the clouds cooperate and the road is open. This will be my 14th Twelve Month series, my eleventh this is a photo series, and the first in my next set of series as I chronicle various parts of Olympic National Park. I began today.

I’ll answer the top FAQ first. No, I’ve only lived in one of the sites. Most are on public land, and sometimes are true wilderness. I visit, or at least try to visit, a few times a month. My goal is to let the place describe the place. Tourist snapshots click away on sunny Saturdays in September, but I add to the story by also showing drizzly Wednesdays in March. Sometimes it turns out there are good reasons why guidebooks skip most of the year, but that also means those parts of Nature’s stories deserve to be documented. 48 photos, two vertical and two horizontal per month times 12 months produce a manageable slice of several stories, but there are always more to tell.

I didn’t have any grand plan when I started. I was stressed-out and bored. My habit had been to always be exploring new sights, sites, and routes, but I started to run out of short drives and wild hikes. One season, rather than stress about where to go, I simply went back to the same site, week after week. Week after week turned into month after month and season after season. I became fascinated by how wrong I was that the same hike would get boring. Seasons change foliage and weather, but conditions also changed enough that sometimes I couldn’t start from a trailhead, but had to walk the road, or bicycle it, or ski it. I saw terrain that I’d blasted through in the Jeep, focused on the road and missing the country.

Cool.

I realized that every hike I’d been on had the same thing happen, but I’d missed the changes because I was always chasing yet another new destination, view, or peak. Someone should document that.

The Pacific Northwest (which is really the Pacific’s Northeast and Canada’s Southwest) has an amazing population of adventurers, as well as an amazing poulation of artists. Surely, someone was enough of both to have done this. No? Ah, but the adventurers were likely to be seasonal or willing to chase adventures around the globe. The writers and photographers did the same. It makes sense. Who cares about wet Wednesdays when Nikon or North Face is going to sponsor an excursion to some exotic locale?

I didn’t know if I could cover a year, but I was hiking anyway. All I had to do was take notes and photos.

It is a simple idea. Show up. Do it.

A marathon is a simple idea. Start running. Don’t stop.

Ah, but locals know that Washington’s Cascades can’t be typified by one lake. I also couldn’t do the hundreds of lakes. I made life easier on myself. Highway 20 (US and WA, I believe) cuts across the Cascades and becomes a pragmatic slice. I picked three lakes: Barclay Lake on the wet west side, Lake Valhalla at the crest, and Merritt Lake on the dry side. Three lakes. Three books. Manageable, manageable as any marathon.

I’ll skip the personal story that put me on Whidbey Island, but I was asked by friends to write a completely different book, one about personal finance (Dream. Invest. Live. which came out as the Great Recession happened, bad timing). I wasn’t going to write two books at once, and the photos in the Cascade series were well received (Really? You want to buy one of those? Uh, okay.) So, why not create a series of photo essays on Whidbey? A series of five became a series of ten. It was nice having gallery shows, until a pandemic interrupted that option.

I’ll also skip the story that put me on the Olympic Peninsula (see my main blog, TrimbathCreative.net for that), where almost any drive, even just for errands, showed glimpses of the mountains. I’ve lived in the Puget Sound area since 1980, so was somewhat familiar with the possibilities. Instead of being some far-off destination, Hurricane Ridge was only an hour and a half drive from my house. Duh. No brainer. Could I take a HINT?

Olympic National Park has mountains, rainforests, rocky coasts, deep mountain lakes, and even some nice lodges. Hurricane Ridge is basically one mile above sea level after a short hike up from the parking lot. Look at the list of Visitor Centers and see a long list of possibilities. I asked if I could produce such a book. They didn’t say no. I’ve sketched out a plan for the subsequent years, but that next decision point is about eleven months away. I started these Twelve Month exercises when I was feeling old, in my forties. Ha. This month, I’ll turn 66. Forget macho stunts. I’ll start with the highest destination, then pick destinations based on drivetimes and interest, saving the ones with lodges for when my body complains enough. Nice bit of accidental planning, eh?

Pardon the long prelude, but I have an entire year to write about the process and answer appropriate questions as they arise.

For now, while I intend to visit any such site at least once a week, I’ve also already snapped that electronic shutter a few dozen times, possibly enough to get those two verticals and two horizontals for January, but where’s the fun in stopping there? More to come, and good luck if you decide to do the same thing wherever you are. It may be trite, but the more the merrier. Merry New Year.

The Cascade Series