canyonwalker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
canyonwalker) wrote2021-08-04 03:44 pm
canyonwalker) wrote2021-08-04 03:44 pm
Entry tags:
Views atop Mt. Howard
Northwest Return Travelog #11
Atop Mt. Howard, OR - Sat, 31 Jul 2021. 2pm.
I'm sure for some people who ride the Wallowa Lake Tram to the top of Mt. Howard it's a matter of ride the tram up, eat some food at the cafe at the top, maybe waddle around a bit, then ride the tram back down. Not us. We're there to hike!
Fortunately with the tram doing a lot of the hard work for us (3,800' of elevation gain!) what's left is an easy...ish loop hike of 2-3 miles around the top of the mountain. It's "-ish" because a) there's still a few hundred feet of vertical up-down to deal with, and b) we're not acclimated to the 8,100' elevation. The town of Clarkston, where we're staying, on the Snake River, is below 1,000' elevation.
We looped around the top of the mountain counter-clockwise. The first spot we visited is marked "Royal Purple" on our map. Royal Purple... what? It's not specified. I'm going to call it Royal Purple Lookout. It's atop that knob in the middle distance. Nothing there was exactly purple today, though. You can see the smoke hanging in the air in these pictures.
Actually, these pictures look better than the sights did in person. A little bit of adjustment in Photoshop with intensity windows and saturation levels counteracts many of the effects of the smoke and clouds. I could have pushed the adjustments harder to cancel out the smoke even more. Instead I've struck a balance here between bringing out the natural beauty of the place and representing what it actually looks like now.
As we hiked the loop around the mountain we were acutely aware of the smoke. ...Not so much because it made us choke (it didn't) but because it was literally everywhere, visible all the time, impairing our views in every direction, constantly. I can only imagine how far we would have been able to see, and how vivid the colors would be, on a clear summer day.
As we wound most of the way around the mountaintop I was lucky to catch a paraglider taking off. I say "lucky" because I didn't even know paragliding was a specific thing up here; I didn't see anyone with equipment down at the lower tram station, nor was there a marker on the map reading "Paragliders: take off here -->." This guy had his parachute all set up when I arrived at this knob on the north side of the mountain and was waiting for the right wind to help him take off. That wind gusted just moments after I arrived, and he was off.
🎵 Into the wildblue gray yonder.
We wrapped up our loop back at the tram station. There's a line here so it's going to be about 15 minutes until we can get a tram, then 15 minutes for the ride back down to the bottom.
Atop Mt. Howard, OR - Sat, 31 Jul 2021. 2pm.
I'm sure for some people who ride the Wallowa Lake Tram to the top of Mt. Howard it's a matter of ride the tram up, eat some food at the cafe at the top, maybe waddle around a bit, then ride the tram back down. Not us. We're there to hike!
Fortunately with the tram doing a lot of the hard work for us (3,800' of elevation gain!) what's left is an easy...ish loop hike of 2-3 miles around the top of the mountain. It's "-ish" because a) there's still a few hundred feet of vertical up-down to deal with, and b) we're not acclimated to the 8,100' elevation. The town of Clarkston, where we're staying, on the Snake River, is below 1,000' elevation.
We looped around the top of the mountain counter-clockwise. The first spot we visited is marked "Royal Purple" on our map. Royal Purple... what? It's not specified. I'm going to call it Royal Purple Lookout. It's atop that knob in the middle distance. Nothing there was exactly purple today, though. You can see the smoke hanging in the air in these pictures.
Actually, these pictures look better than the sights did in person. A little bit of adjustment in Photoshop with intensity windows and saturation levels counteracts many of the effects of the smoke and clouds. I could have pushed the adjustments harder to cancel out the smoke even more. Instead I've struck a balance here between bringing out the natural beauty of the place and representing what it actually looks like now.
As we hiked the loop around the mountain we were acutely aware of the smoke. ...Not so much because it made us choke (it didn't) but because it was literally everywhere, visible all the time, impairing our views in every direction, constantly. I can only imagine how far we would have been able to see, and how vivid the colors would be, on a clear summer day.
As we wound most of the way around the mountaintop I was lucky to catch a paraglider taking off. I say "lucky" because I didn't even know paragliding was a specific thing up here; I didn't see anyone with equipment down at the lower tram station, nor was there a marker on the map reading "Paragliders: take off here -->." This guy had his parachute all set up when I arrived at this knob on the north side of the mountain and was waiting for the right wind to help him take off. That wind gusted just moments after I arrived, and he was off.
🎵 Into the wild
We wrapped up our loop back at the tram station. There's a line here so it's going to be about 15 minutes until we can get a tram, then 15 minutes for the ride back down to the bottom.