Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

I'm pretty much done with the photos from my May road trip/backpacking expedition to New Mexico. I'll finish up today with a few final shots from the drive home, most of them showing weather in action, because that's mostly what I stopped to take pictures of (and I did encounter some weather), and move on to summer hikes soon. There were a lot of clouds and rain shafts on my way across Arizona and up into the Bears Ears National Monument.  Climbing the Moki Dugway gave me some great views of both the weather and an amazing landscape (which if we don't do a lot of collective screaming my be destroyed forever since the Monument has been shrunken to exclude it).     A couple of days later, after my hikes at Bears Ears and Natural Bridges , I shot these photos in east central Oregon.   Those were rather large and fast-building thunderstorm clouds. The forecast suggested that the storm would be more to the west, so I chose to stay more east, taking US 395 to John Day. It...

It's the weekend, and time for more eye candy! Back at the very end of August I joined my brother-in-law and his nephew in a 4-night, 5-day backpack on the Timberline Trail around Mt. Hood in Oregon. At about 42 miles, with around 10,000' of up and down (if you think a trail that draws a circle around a mountain stays at the same elevation, think again!), we chose to take our time. We met a startling number of people with a different approach: trail runners doing the whole thing in one day. I admire them and envy them, but my days of imagining I can emulate them are definitely over. Since we started with a four-hour drive down from Seattle, we didn't hit the trail until 2 p.m. the first day. That meant hiking until dinner time to get to a particularly scenic campsite in Paradise Park. The first photo is by my brother-in-law, photographer Tom Dempsey, whose amazing work can be found at Photoseek.com . At the risk of making you lose all interest in my post, his take on the tr...

Since some of you may be wondering where the Wallowas are: they are a small range in the far NE corner of Oregon, in part at least renowned for having a bit of a feel of California's Sierra Nevada Mountains--without so much altitude! Back in September I did a road trip with my brother- and sister-in-law, beginning with several days around the Wallowa Mountains and three scenic dayhikes, mostly within the Eagle Cap Wilderness. Hike #1 was a 7 1/2-mile round trip to Bonney Lake. The road to the trailhead was a little rough, but passable with my Prius. YMMV. After a short stretch of pleasant valley bottom and a stream crossing, a big chunk of the middle of the hike to the lake was through an area that had burned in a fire within the last year or two--very fresh still. Nothing like finding your trail signs well-blackened. We eventually climbed above the burn and into the sub-alpine meadows. This part felt more like the Rockies than the Sierra. Pretty sure that was volcanic, though, so...