I’m not here.

A good friend of mine and I went backpacking in the North Cascades a couple of weeks ago (been busy, this post is a bit late), setting up camp on the slopes of Mt Baker — unfortunately the weather prevented us from seeing it clearly except from a distance on the hike up to camp.

The plan was to hike to Park Butte and enjoy the views but with overcast skies and limited visibility we ended up seeing fewer mountains …

… but a ridiculous number of marmots (and I still remember when not so long ago seeing a marmot was a very unique treat)!

Fortunately we did enjoy a mountain sunset but if you look closely you can see the coming rain.

After enjoying our time watching marmots playing, running, staring, nursing, fighting, whistling and otherwise being everywhere we decided to head to a lower elevation in the hopes of avoiding some of the fog and clouds.

Better idea than execution — when we arrived at Blue Lake the fog was noticeable …

… and within a couple of minutes even more so.

Of course any adventure to the great outdoors isn’t complete without some mushroom photos — among all the fog and green these yellow cup mushrooms really stood out.

Despite the less than ideal weather conditions, it was overall a great weekend with a great friend. The next time we go to Park Butte I hope not only is the weather better but that we’re fortunate enough to echo our now familiar refrain “oh look, a marmot!”

We went on a nature walk through IslandWood today with an amazing naturalist. Probably the coolest thing we saw was a Drosera species, commonly known as sundews — the green swirls with the red tentacles in the photo. What makes them cool is two-fold, they grow only in bogs and they are carnivorous!

We enjoyed a marvelously sunny weekend which commenced with a trip with some friends to Sequim’s Lavender Festival. Unfortunately, from a photographic perspective, it was a bit too sunny with too many people and I had a hard time finding pictures I wanted. The photo above reminds me a bit of some scotch broom and a shed I photographed last summer.

If you do go to the festival, skip the farms near the highway because they’re really crowded. Our family favorite farm is Jardin du Soleil which we’ve been to before.

My daughter and I enjoyed a great hike in the woods this morning and happened upon a new wildflower for us: Monotropa uniflora, also known as Ghost Plant or Indian Pipe. Through the otherwise dark and green forest these flowers really popped out against the ground. At first I thought they were some sort of candystick or pinesap like I saw on my hike to Heather Park but closer inspection showed otherwise. The photo above used no flash — it took your eyes some adjusting to see them clearly even in the woods.

It’s especially interesting to me because, as wikipedia explains, it generates it’s energy not from chlorophyll but through being parasitic on fungi that are mycorrhizal with trees. And any reader of my blog knows I enjoy mushroom photography.

I spent Saturday and Sunday with a couple of friends escaping the rain and cold in Puget Sound by traveling over the Cascades to the Eastern slopes for an overnight backpack to Ingalls Creek. We had originally planned a trip to Spider Meadows but some concern about snow caused a change in plans.

We arrived Saturday around noon to find the “creek” was raging white water (turned out to be a perfect foil to one my camping buddy’s snoring). We hiked about five miles along rather easy trails, setup camp and attempted some fishing, but seeing no rising fish gave up rather quickly. We went back to camp, had a fantastic campfire, dinner and enjoyed some well earned bourbon.

On Sunday we got up late (oh so nice to get some sleep) and left to find the head waters of the creek. The lighting was pretty poor, with patchy sun and fog, so the photography was less than spectacular.

It was somewhat different terrain from my usual hikes through the Olympic mountains and made for some interesting finds, most notably, morels!

I found another neat little red mushroom near my tent but haven’t been able to positively identify it.