August 27, 2013 Okanagan National Forest, Washington

We are on our way to North Cascade National Park. Labor day weekend is coming up, so we are grabbing a place just to the east of the park for the weekend.

We past through Twisp on the way up. Then Winthrop.  Winthrop is a little touristy.

We  got parked in Klipchuck (Klipchuck means deep water in the native Indian tongue) campground and went off on a hike to Cedar Falls that Dennis from the Smallwood farms told us about. We are on the rainy side of the Cascades now, and the Pacific northwest is very wet and green. We hiked past Cedar falls, we couldn’t see it through all the foliage, but found in on the way back. This is the upper fall. It just shoots straight out off the rocks.  The canyon is a really deep, narrow gorge, with real steep sides. Climbing down to the view point was precarious.

John, looking like an evil elf lured me down an even steeper  climb down to the bottom of the upper falls, and the top of the lower falls. There is a mist coming off the falls, so the rocks and the climb are slippery.  But it was worth it.

Here I am backlit in the mist. John crawled on his belly and took this photo of the lower falls. If I had slipped climbing down I would have gone over this cliff.

We headed back down to camp. The light was lovely, then it started to rain and there was a rainbow.

Berries, mushroom, seeds, rubber looking snake, an aster past it’s last gasp and moss on the tree trunks.

Fall is on it’s way, there are leaves turning here and there. The evergreen is a cedar.

It rained before we hiked and there were drops of water everywhere, when the sun came out everything glittered.