Every photographer eventually builds a list of landscapes they drove away from. North Cascades National Park is on that list — east of Seattle, east of where I was headed when I flew into Washington to begin the 50 at 60 journey, east of the Pacific coast and Olympic that pulled me westward on that first trip. I could see the Cascade Range from the highway. I turned left instead of right and never made it.
I have not been to Crater Lake. It is one of the parks I most want to correct that about, and the research I have done in preparation has only deepened the anticipation. The lake sits in the caldera of Mount Mazama, a volcano that erupted catastrophically approximately 7,700 years ago and then collapsed into itself, leaving a bowl six miles across and 2,000 feet deep that slowly filled with water over centuries. The Klamath people witnessed that eruption. Their oral traditions describe it. The geology and the human history are both extraordinary — and both visible in a single view from the rim.
I was staying at a small inn in Gig Harbor — Washington was the first state of my 50 at 60 journey, the trip that set everything in motion — when the aurora alerts started coming in. I had been aware that a significant geomagnetic storm was building, but what the images showing up online made clear was that this was not an ordinary aurora event. The sky in the photographs was not the typical pale green curtain. It was a deep, saturated red that I had never seen in any aurora image before, a color so vivid and so unusual that it seemed almost artificial. The storm was a G5 — the strongest geomagnetic event in two decades — and it was driving the aurora down to latitudes far south of where it normally appears.
When planning a visit to America’s national parks, Washington State offers two experiences that could not be more different from each other — the wild Pacific coast of Olympic and the volcanic summit of Mount Rainier, each extraordinary in its own way, each requiring its own kind of attention. I started my 50 at 60 journey in Washington and visited both. Rainier was first.