Brown Mountain Trail
I walked on this trail late last summer for several hours and didn’t encounter a single person. It was wonderful.
Ashland Daily Photo - A picture a day from beautiful Ashland, Southern Oregon USA in the Rogue Valley
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Eastview Trail – Ashland, Oregon
The guidebooks for hiking or biking Eastview Trail talk about the wonderful views from the trail itself. Actually, there aren’t any views of the east anymore from Eastview Trail as the trees have grown since the trail was created and now the views are all obstructed. It’s still a nice trail though.
Near the trailhead, you do get a bit of a view from the location pictured here. That’s Mount McLoughlin poking up in the distance on the right.
A stroll through the Trinity Alps
Today’s photo is from the archives, July of 2009 to be exact. Without a person or two in this photo you don’t get the sense of just how tall these trees were in Northern California.
Near Brown Mountain
Forest between "Lake of the Woods" and Brown Mountain - Southern Oregon
Today’s photo is from late summer of last year when I did the Brown Mountain Trail–a trail which doesn’t actually go up Brown Mountain at all.
Dusk hiking on Grizzly Peak
Hiking Grizzly Peak at dusk
Last night we went for a little hike on Grizzly Peak and timed it so that we’d get to the side facing Ashland about the time the sun went down. The views were even better than I had imagined, and the way back down in the dark (we had flashlights and headlamps) wasn’t bad either.
The stars from the Grizzly Peak Trail parking lot were amazing too. The Milky Way was clearly visible, and it wasn’t cold.
Wagner Butte Hike (6 of 7)
Wildflowers on Wagner Butte hike
For today’s first photo I decided to have some fun with my new ultra wide-angle lens. At f/3.5 (the lowest f stop I can go with it), 10mm, and getting as close to the flower and still being able to focus as I can, the results are intriguing.
View from Wagner Butte Trail
Butterfly lands on yellow wildflower
With lots of wildflowers come lots of butterflies. I’m digging the macro capabilities and nice bokeh with my new lens.
Wagner Butte Hiking (5 of 7)
View of Pilot Rock and Mount Ashland from the top of Wagner Butte
The top photo today is about as wide a picture as you can get from the top of Wagner Butte. I had my ultra wide-angle lens on my Nikon D7000 and shot this at 10mm. Pilot Rock and Mt. Ashland look very far away, but they wouldn’t if I was shooting at, say, 50mm or even 24mm.
Most days in Ashland’s summer feature no clouds at all. The sky usually isn’t this blue either as forest fires in Northern California or Southern Oregon tend to give the sky a gray haze. However, I got pretty lucky on this day to have bluer than normal skies and some clouds as an added bonus. About 3 hours after I took the above photo we had a brief thunder and lightning storm.
Wagner Butte, Jackson County, Oregon
The foundation for the lookout that was here until the 1970s is all that remains on Wagner Butte. There looked to be a rusted sink or something too. I didn’t get too close to it as there was a tornado of bugs swirling above.
Medford is in this direction, a bit to the right.
Wagner Butte Hike (4 of 7)
As a hiker approaches the top of Wagner Butte the scene changes again. Instead of forest, desert, wildflower-covered field, or grassy meadow there are a few rocks to climb (not difficult) to get to the top.
I have never seen a dandelion seed head this big before. I should have put a finger in the photo to give the viewer a point of reference. Usually they are smaller than a golf ball, but this one (and the others in the field on the Wagner Butte trail) was bigger than my fist.
The sign on the top of Wagner Butte has been there for probably a couple decades now. The elements have not been kind, and it is now barely readable.
Wagner Butte (3 of 7)
Looking west (and maybe a bit south) from the western slopes of Wagner Butte yields the above view which is probably Little Applegate in the foreground. I’m not sure what mountain ranges go beyond that.
As I mentioned yesterday, sometimes the landscape can get a bit desert like; however, frequently there are wildflowers right in the middle of these scenes. I wonder how different this view would be in the morning (or a month or two earlier). I took this photo in the late afternoon in early September.
Along the Wagner Butte trail you cross a dozen or so streams. This late in the year they were mostly a trickle of water, but in spring, or while it is raining, I imagine they can be somewhat tricky to cross. This one was probably twenty feet across of mud in early September so crossing over via the log helped to keep shoes from becoming a mess even without a small river coming down the mountainside.
My new 10-24mm lens can do some pretty cool things in the macro photography world, nice bokeh too. I was surprised how close I could get and still focus. The specs said the minimum focus distance was 9.5 inches, but I was less than that far away on this photo (and even closer on some others I’ll show you in the next few days). My other lens really does require a distance between the end of the lens and the focus subject of at least a foot and a half.
This flower probably looked much better a week or two earlier in the year. I’d like to do this hike in, say, July and then again in September of the same year to compare the wildflowers. Do some last all summer long or are there totally different wildflowers blossoming and dying as the summer progresses?
Wagner Butte Hike (part 2 of 7)
I don’t believe I’ve ever been on a trail with so many varieties of surroundings as the Wagner Butte Trail. You can be under a forest canopy one minute, have lush vegetation under foot the next, follow it up walking through a meadow of wildflowers, and then be in a desert-like atmosphere soon thereafter. The views change constantly as well. Change is the only constant throughout.
