Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Maybe due to indolence, maybe to spending most of my weekends selling books, or to my protracted struggle to get my new WIP (Work In Progress) to cooperate, I haven't gotten up to the local mountains as much as I intended this summer. To be precise, I've done one dayhike and two quick overnighters. In this post, and maybe one for next weekend, I'm sharing some of the photos from those trips. Today I'm featuring an overnight hike to Island and Rainbow Lakes, just off of I90. The I90 corridor is hugely popular with Seattlites for the obvious reason that it's a super-short drive. I worked all morning, left my house about 1 p.m., and was on the trail by 2:15. It's hard to beat that. There are several ways to get to Island Lake; I chose the one with the least elevation gain and maybe the least crowded TH. Starting that late in the day meant I had no trouble getting parking, as the early hikers were already leaving. It helped that it was a Wednesday, not a weekend. Ab...

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...

Natural Bridges is located in SE Utah, and is (or has been) surrounded by the Bears Ears National Monument, which it predates by a good century--Natural Bridges National Monument was created by Teddy Roosevelt in 1908 (Bears Ears was protected in 2016). The heart of the monument is the White Canyon, where there are three significant bridges-- Kachina , Owachomo , and Sipapu.  My project on the May morning I was there was to hike to the Sipapu bridge, a 1.5-mile drop into the canyon and back out. What I ended up doing was a 5.75 mile loop from Sipapu to Owachomo and back up over the mesa to my car. Sun's up--time to get out of camp! 20 minutes later at the Sipapu Bridge overlook. Spot the bridge down there? You can't actually see through it from this angle. Time for another bit of pedantry. In case you are wondering, there's a reason these are called bridges, not arches. And that reason is totally tied up to their location. If you've visited Arches NP, you know y...

Well, if this isn't a bit bittersweet, revisiting Bears Ears just as the size of the monument--and of Grand Staircase-Escalante , another favorite stomping ground--is being slashed by an entity I shall not name. If you think these photos--or the others from my trips to these areas--show something special, maybe lift up your voice and let Congress know we aren't happy about this latest move. I try not to get political on this blog, but sometimes silence is not acceptable. Shrinking this monument and others in Utah is unacceptable.  Two years ago I spent a week backpacking Grand Gulch in the Bears Ears (see link above). This time I was in transit, and only had a few hours in the Monument. I made the most of them. Stop 1: Mule Canyon/House on Fire It was almost 4 p.m. when I headed up Mule Canyon on the 1 mile walk to House on Fire. The weather wasn't wholly cooperative. I almost turned back when it started to rain, but such desert showers don't usually last, and it didn...