More Oregon fun!

For the Holiday, I went over to the Oregon Coast, as usual, to see my Mom. She was very happy to see me, as none of her other sons or grandchildren came up to see her this year.

This first picture is a "leftover" from my last trip to Crater Lake. I tried to frame the viw of the Phantom Ship with natural items in the field of view. I'm not exactly happy with many of the photos I took on that trip. It seems that I should've had more really eye-catching, spetacular pictures but, I can find things wrong with so many from this batch.

Here's another "leftover" that could use some "tweaking" of the original exposure. I'm finding out that many of the pictures I take have fundamental problems with contrast. I attribute this to my Fuji's automatic mode. I'm sure there's lots of ways to correct this stuff like spot metering and manual mode exposure control. Dayum, I gotta find that camera manual!

This picture below still has the potential to be one of my best ones taken that day. I'll have to play around with it a bit.

OK, yesterday I was coming back from Mom's, driving along Oregon Route 38, which crosses the Cascades through the Diamond Lake area. The road is so incredibly scenic and typically Oregon, with lots of old growth forests, an impressive major river and geologic wonders at almost every turn. I stopped for a rest at Clearwater Falls, a campground and picnic area in the Umpqua National Forest, and snapped off a few pics that tickled my fancy. These very tall Douglas-fir trees top out at over 200 feet tall.

Now, we get into the high country, returning to views of the 9000 foot ancient volcano called Mount Thielsen and Diamond Lake. There's a very nice bike trail that connects several campgrounds on the west shore of Diamond Lake. It looks like a great place for a weeklong campout. (Hint, hint, Mrs. Zig!) As I said in a previous posting, I climbed that peak back in '84. You can see the route we went up, as it goes diagonally from the lower right corner up to the peak.

Here's a zoomed-in closeup of the spectacular Mt. Thielsen. The last final 80 feet at the summit pinnacle was where we climbed, using the ropes, harnesses and hardware to safely climb above a 2000 sheer drop-off. That upper-most portion of the left-hand side of the pinnacle was the class 4 route my climbing partner wanted to climb. The regular route follows the right-hand side of the pinnacle. Both routes are NOT for the scared-of-heights crowd... heh heh.