Hurrah!Originally Posted by Bob Sawin
And a note for the less limber among us – for the next few weeks, chances are you'll have to climb a snow bank to access trails near the Pass.
Bring your technical gear!
Hurrah!
And a note for the less limber among us – for the next few weeks, chances are you'll have to climb a snow bank to access trails near the Pass.
Bring your technical gear!
The North Cascade pass opened yesterday at noon. I'm happy to say that the bakery has two fewer Twists on display after my 2 visits. Better hurry over before they're all gone.
This one came out:
But this one didn't:
When I was up on the pass, I snapped a pic of the huge blades on the snow plow. Unfortunately, I got busy putting things away, and I forgot to pull the film. And then I went to Diablo Dam, where I photographed some of the pylons. And then I realized I had crossed the plow with high voltage, and created a monster!!!
And this is what a Toyo 45AX with Nikkor 210W looks like with major contortions:
(OK, so I used a telephone to photograph a camera.)
"It's the way to educate your eyes. Stare. Pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long." - Walker Evans
Yes, that's a monster machine no matter how the image comes out!
Here's the monster devouring snow two weeks ago...
Glad you captured some opening-week scenes – a spectacular world up there right now.
The snowplow shots make me think of a meeting we had in Northern Japan one February. Turned out it was college entrance exam time (kids in japan actually go to the college to take the exams - no College Board style national exams.) All the hotels were sold out so we found rooms at a mountaintop ski resort where they seemed to be getting a foot or two of snow every night. They must have run a huge machine up the roads in the early AM every day because the road looked like you were driving through a ditch - the snow on the sides of the road was cut straight up what looked to be about 10 to 12 feet in places. We had an intensely type A exec from our customer with us - he wanted to be on the phone or online all night, but there was no wifi and the only way to get a line out was to call the front desk and ask them to place a call for you - and nobody in the place spoke a word of English. I thought he was going to explode from frustration! i swear he woke me up ten times a night to translate. I also remember trying to get across a pass in Japan on the first day they opened it - we ran into a lengthy traffic jam of people who had been waiting in their cars for several days. The first people across each year were on TV and in the news so it was a big media event. We turned around and went the long way.
And those high vertical walls make you feel like you're in a toboggan.
Here's the "pace car" up near Washington Pass, an inspector during snow removal.
Hope the bladed plow isn't coming down in the opposite direction!
Please excuse my digression. This reminds me of a flood of memories. My late best friend, of Japanese decent who was born in Nebraska but soon as a small child on a bus in Tokyo when Jimmy Doolittle came through; bus stopped and passengers scattered for shelter, he was too small to understand why everyone was running. Later he attended U. of Tokyo to get an engineering degree in 3 yrs, a very strict entrance exam required all questions be answered IN INK & any strikeouts or erasures meant zero for that question. He told me one of the questions was deceptively simple but with a very complex solution, and only one applicant got the answer - that person turned out to be a genius. I asked him for the answer, and he said he could only give an "approximate" solution. He got his degree, then came to U.S. to work in L.A., but U.S. would not recognize his degree, so he went to UCLA to again get his degree. I met him at work that year and became good friends. I later found out he could do calculus in his head. He's responsible for getting me into b/w darkroom work and that I should follow his lead by getting two Leica M3's - one for color and one for b/w. He had no idea what he started. He so loved mathematics - one Sunday morning I knocked on his door to join me for breakfast out and he looked like he'd been up all night. I asked if he was OK, and he said he'd been up until after 3 a.m. doing some math and listening to Beethoven; he had calculations/papers spread all over the floor. That's how he was relaxing instead of sleeping. What a guy!
I have a friend in Japan who is from Akita (where the Akita dog is from.) It's one of the snowiest inhabited places anywhere as they get all the snow that forms when the cold air from Siberia picks up moisture over the Sea of Japan and dumps it when it hits the mountains in Akita (So called "Lake Effect" on steroids)
The old houses had a 3rd story attic with an exit door so you could get out in the winter. He said that you had to be careful not to walk into the electric lines. In the old days they used to tunnel under the snow and stores and restaurants would even be open in the tunnels. To this day they plant before the snow melts or there won't be enough growing time. Wonderful place. How I could have lived in Japan all those years without a LF camera is beyond me. I'm trying to plan a kit to take with me next trip to try to rectify the omission!
Not exactly the same place, but I see the entire road to the popular Cascade Pass trailhead will be closed after Labor Day this year for road repairs. So I scratched
that one off my list of potential hikes this year.
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