Light on Ranger Falls, Mount Rainier National Park

This past Sunday we were treated to some very nice weather, and my wife and I took the opportunity to take in a hike in Mount Rainier National Park. In the northwest corner of the park, closest to Seattle, there is the Carbon River entrance to the park. The road was washed out some years back from a flood of the Carbon River, which made all of the hikes originating along the road slightly less accessible, as the road now has to be hiked.

I think as a result this corner of the park has become less popular, as I never really hear or see anything from it. Despite that, we decided to head for the Green Lake trail. While the trail itself is only about 4 miles, the aforementioned road damage adds 3 easy miles on either end of that - about 10 miles total round trip.

We new very little about the hike other than its length, and once we began the climb up the trail proper towards the lake, we eventually encountered Ranger Falls - an added bonus we were unaware of. Ranger Falls turned out to be absolutely gorgeous. At the viewpoint along the trail you look up to the top of the fall, seen here, which plunges down and divides into two separate cascades, then combines back into one. In the short time we were there early in the afternoon, sunlight just began to break through over the top of the falls and light up some of the fine spray and mist of that first cascade, seen here.

I made the mistake of not packing my tripod for this particular trip, and while the opportunity to shoot a waterfall a tripod is always nice to have. I took my photos with my camera resting on a guardrail for support. The majority of the resultant images showed far more camera shake than I'd expected (the LCD images are deceptive in such cases), so most of my photos won't go beyond my own monitor. This isn't necessarily my favorite framing, but the light is nice and it happens to be relatively sharp. I'd really love to make it back there some time, hopefully with my tripod in hand.

Nikon D90 | Nikon 18-200VR@80mm | f/11 | 1/5s | ISO100 | Braced on Railing

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