A Sunny Saturday in Oregon
For 400 days of the year, it rains in Oregon, so when the skies are clear and the sun is out, I try to enjoy it as much as possible. This collection of photos started with getting up at 1am and driving out to the town of Mt Hood, located just south of Hood River.
It was clear that night and my itch for Milky Way photos has been driving me crazy, so I opted to take advantage of the clear night. Now, I had two places in mind to shoot - one was a lavender field and the other was the apple orchard you often seen in spring photos of Mt Hood. We arrived at the lavender field to discover it's closed at night. Then we drove to the apple orchard to discover there's just too much light pollution to really see Mt Hood from there. So we drove around until we found a field where we could see Hood and the Milky Way just before dawn started to break.
After that, we drove to the apple orchard to get some photos of the bloom with Mt Hood - of course this had to be one of those mornings where there were no clouds in the sky. I like clouds, they add to the photo and really bring those morning colors out. After being there for nearly two hours, I got some early light photos over the orchard and Mt Hood and we moved on to Rowena Crest for the spring bloom.
Of course the bloom isn't in full effect right now; the lupine aren't blooming at the top just yet, but they are blooming on the road leading up to the viewpoint. That aside, the sunflowers (are they sunflower? They look like small sunflowers, so I am going to call them that until someone tells me what they really are) were blooming beautifully. Oh, and there are ticks up here...I guess. I'm not sure about some of you, but once I know there are certain bugs in an area, I spend the next week mentally freaking myself out and feeling like something is crawling on me regardless of the fact that there is nothing crawling on me.
So there you have it - a Saturday morning in Oregon along the Mt Hood region. It's nice...when it's not raining!
