As the end of the Northwest “shooting season” draws near, I (along with many other of the area’s photographers) find myself rushing to get in as much of autumn as I can before hunkering down to the coming four-to-five months of steady rain, slate-gray skies, bare branches, and brown vegetation.  (Not that there’s nothing to shoot up here in winter, it’s just that you don’t have the great day-in, day-out opportunities you have the rest of the year.)

Thus it was that I found myself making not one but two round-trips to the Oregon border and points further south this past weekend.

The first was a shooting excursion/family trip along the Columbia, then back up through Trout Lake and Klickitat Canyon before returning through central Washington in the evening.  Unfortunately, this trip only offered a few good photo opportunities.  (While setting up a shot, I encountered one of the residents of Trout Lake, who mentioned to me that the foliage had been a lot better before a storm came through the night before, stripping many of the remaining leaves from the trees.  Go figure.)  The day wasn’t a total loss, though, as I got a few decent autumn images, including the two you see here.  (The one above is of Mount Adams, the third-most-famous volcano in southwest Washington, after Rainier and St. Helens.)  And I certainly discovered a new area to which I’ll be sure to return next year, hopefully under better conditions.

It was on Sunday, however, that I “struck gold”…literally.

Getting up at an ungodly hour after the previous night’s late return, I found myself taking the same route down to Portland in the darkness of early morning.  (Thank heaven for the working cruise control on my replacement for “Big Blue,” along with the new Beatles reissues on CD!)   This time, however, I continued on I-5 down to Salem, arriving at Silver Falls State Park, a renowned fall foliage location, just after the clouds had rolled in, making for an ideal day for waterfall photography.

I had never been to Silver Falls before…I was unprepared for the overwhelming beauty I found there.  Although it doesn’t have the variety of falls found, say, in the Columbia Gorge, it does have a whole collection of impressive waterfalls plunging into deep, narrow canyons which, in autumn, are filled — almost bursting — with golden big-leaf maples, evergreen conifers. and the bright green of moss and ground-cover.  On many of the falls, you can walk behind the fall itself and view the autumnal forest with the water’s plume as a ghostly foreground.  For the nature photographer, it’s almost a case of sensory overload. I only made it to three of the ten falls before the predicted autumn storm arrived, cutting my trip short, but it’s just as well.  Had I remained any longer, I woudn’t have been able to pull myself away until winter had stripped ever last bit of fall color from the canyons.

First on my route was South Falls:

Then, on to North Falls:

Finally, Upper North Falls, where the rains moved in moments after I took this shot:

Only time will tell if this was, indeed, the last major photo session of 2009 for me.  All I can say is, if so, the Northwest “shooting season” ended on the highest possible note I could imagine.