Wallowa Lake, and day trips

While I was at Brass Camp, I didn't have much time to do anything but teach and eat and try to sleep.  I think the sleeping was the hardest- the sun was up before 6 each morning, and it took me several days to realize that it was coming right through the window and waking me up.  Some heavy blankets solved that problem.

This selection of photos is fairly random.  Most were made at less than ideal times of day, and none were made in real wild areas, which are my usual habits.  The light on the lake was often confounding: though it's very scenic, the mountain that backdrop the lake get no sunset light at this time of year, and the area on the other side of the lake is a small town.  So, while I did see some amazing light, the nearby scenery wasn't helpful:

That's the best light, but there wasn't any way to get a no-clutter photo of it.  Oh well, this one was pretty nice, with an assist from the moon:

I did manage to take a few trips.  One, on my mountain bike, was to ride out of camp and down the road to Joseph for about a mile.  Then, after crawling under a fence, I'd enter a local rancher's property.  He has placed the land under some kind of conservation easement, and allows folks to visit.  Cattle are still grazing here, though, and avoiding cow patties was the main technical difficulty on the ride.  The main difficulty was aerobic: climbing the absurdly steep road at this high (for me) elevation.  It was burning lungs time.  Great fun!

The rewards are obvious:

They call this whole area around the Wallowas the "Oregon Alps" or "Little Switzerland".  With all due respects to the community in North Carolina that calls itself the same, I think the Wallowas fit the bill more perfectly.  It's not just the impressive vertical relief of the mountains, but the fact that they are surrounded by miles of lush green pasture and farm land.  It's certainly not the politics!

The road goes to the top of what's called The Moraine, a giant ridge of material dumped by the continuous movement of the glacier that created the lake thousands of year ago.  At the top of the ridge, the road heads up to the trees of the Wallowa Whitman National Forest:

I didn't have time for that (had to get back to teaching trombone!) so I turned back around and explored a tiny bit down the pasture, where I found a typically amazing bucolic scene, complete with cows:

After screaming down the road (and scaring one poor cow out of her wits!) I stopped to look at the lake close up:

One of the evenings we had a social event in Joseph, the small town nearby.  Afterwards I took a while photographing downtown under moonlight:

One of the days, I took a friend hiking.  This friend has some notorious bad luck with outdoor adventures.  I thought maybe we could take a short easy trip, so he could see how nice it can be withouth getting lost.  Sure enough, we reached a creek that, according to my guidebook, would be a shallow ford.  Not so.  It was swollen from much recent rain.  I stepped in with my trekking poles to check it out.  The water raged over very slick rocks with moss growth.  20 feet downstream was a precipitous waterfall.  It was a bad scene!

I probably could have done it, and might have done it myself, but being in a group can make me cautious (that's probably backwards, I know, but since I hike so much, I feel more responsible for anyone hiking with me than I feel for myself).  We turned back around and found a boot path heading back down our way.  We couldn't find any other way over the water, and were bushwacking over steep slopes in heavy brush in no time.  I swear I just wanted to take him on an easy 2.5 mile hike!  We got out (through someone's backyard accidentally), and I promised my friend that that kind of thing doesn't normally happen to me when I hike.  Maybe his bad luck rubbed off on me.

Anyway.  By the end of the week, I was still trying to get that calendar shot of Wallowa Lake.  I had some close ones:

Now this one was real close, but that guy in the boat never drifted out of the picture.  Just kept making exasperating circles!

Since I felt that I hadn't quite gotten what I wanted with sunlight, I took one last photo of the lake.  Using the flash and an centered framing isn't my main mode, so it turned out rather different:

Hope you enjoyed reading!