Tag Archives: mountains

Mountain trimmings

Posting here has been a little light lately, while I help make Christmas happen at home. But while there’s nothing quite like basking in the glow of your own tree, I also love traveling at the holidays—if only because I get to see how other places deck the halls, or experience different regional traditions.

Best of all (for me) is when everything is festive … inside—

—and out.

Wherever you are spending your holidays this year, I hope they find you cozy and warm—and wreathed in light.

Merry Christmas!

The Turning

There’s been a crispness in the air here all week—the first sign that my favorite season is well on its way. Autumn in the Northwest isn’t quite the spectacular show of reds and golds that you might find in New England or, say, Wisconsin, but I love it for its own qualities. Instead of huge swaths of gold, you get foggy watercolor washes of indigo conifers (they really should call them everblues around here…)—which are the perfect compliment to the pops of orange that appear in pockets along the hillsides.

Before I moved to Washington, my travel watercolor set had fifteen colors in it. I’d already been doing the travel sketching thing for years by that point, so I figured I had my system down. (And besides, fifteen seemed like an incredible luxury, when I could potentially have made do with five or six.) Well, within two weeks of moving here, indigo became my sixteenth color—and I’m pretty sure I’ve used it in every single landscape sketch I’ve made here.

It’s a good reminder that no matter how much I think I know from experience, and art school, and all of that, I need to keep observing what’s actually in front of me—because nature knows a heckuva lot more about color theory than I ever will.

Big rig

The day I made this sketch was the first time I’d ever stayed in any sort of RV or motorhome (the Tailor and I are more of a tent-camping couple ourselves). But when we joined the Tailor’s aunt and uncle for a few days in Rocky Mountain National Park, I felt like I was having some sort of exciting road trip rite of passage—like I’d suddenly, finally upgraded my Americana membership.

Besides, I have to say, it’s a pretty amazing feeling to wake up next to this:

…without the stiff neck and sore back of having to sleep on the ground first!

Engineered by mountain goats

When I’m planning a road trip, I try to avoid interstate highways whenever possible. When in doubt, state and U.S. highways are almost always a better choice—both for scenic drives and for interesting road vistas. But even better than that are the roads through most national parks—which are specifically designed to give visitors the most beautiful drive imaginable. And by that logic, Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road might just be the most spectacular ribbon of road in the whole country.

Going-to-the-Sun Road is both a feat of engineering and a marvel of determined highway maintenance. It’s only open for a few months every year, and takes weeks to clear of snow before it opens in the summer. It’s also not for the faint of heart—I love mountain driving, but I don’t love heights, and even at our crawling pace, all those hairpin curves made my stomach plummet to the floor every few minutes.

But oh—oh. I’d gather my courage and brave any precarious goat track for this. I’d cross a continent for a view like that.

And since our day at Glacier fell at the very end of a five-week cross-country trip–that’s precisely what we did.

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Super moonrise

I had other plans for today’s post, but I had a surprise on Saturday evening that changed all of that. I spent the day on the Oregon coast, and arrived on the home stretch just as the last light was fading. As I neared the Nisqually Delta, I looked east out of habit, where I knew I’d see Mt. Rainier above the ridge. The moon was just on its way up, but this time it was no ordinary moonrise. The full moon that night was a supermoon—where the full moon coincides with the point on its orbit where it is closest to Earth.

The result was jaw-dropping—I had just enough time and presence of mind to take the next exit, head to the nearest uphill spot, pull over, and jot down a quick sketch with my pencil. When I got home (and had access to a proper lamp!), I filled in the color.

It’ll never match what I saw that night. But at the very least, it’ll always remind me of the moment—and how lucky I was to be able to witness it.

Front Range from the front seat

There are some roads I have traveled so often that I have permanently etched into my memory every landmark, every sign, every single geographical feature along the way. The seventy miles between Colorado Springs and Denver is one of those stretches. When I was a kid, I knew exactly how far we were from our destination by which butte we passed; the profiles of every mountain in every season; and which hill was next to appear on the horizon. Every time I go back, no matter how much farmland has been converted into brand new suburbs, the mountains never change—and my mental map gets retraced with the same lines. On this day, I sketched while the Tailor drove, but I just as easily could have done this from memory—laying out every hill and peak along the route on one long, continuous sheet of paper.

Perfect panorama

For the many days of the year, these mountains are invisible. If you showed up in western Washington in November, you might not even know we had mountains here. Our rainy Northwest climate makes these peaks disappear into the clouds on most days—even, sometimes, when you’re right there, standing amongst them.

Not in the summertime, though. The best thing about the Northwest is that in the summer, the clouds disappear for months on end—and nearly every day we’re treated to crystal-clear views and flawless blue skies.

Stones and subdivisions

The very same day the Tailor and I breezed by a sign painter’s version of a petroglyph, we also got to see the real thing, up close.

Of course, they were beautiful and fascinating—but what really got me was the fact that the remnants of an ancient pueblo civilization were perched above a modern suburban neighborhood…

…and that the suburban neighborhood was designed to resemble an ancient pueblo civilization.

Field geometry

Wednesday’s post reminded me that like lighthouses, I seem to have a whole collection of farm field drawings—like this sketch I did last year. I always thought the inherent lesson in one-point perspective (sketching nerds unite!) is what made these fun to draw. But now I think it’s the geometry. There’s just something so satisfying about finding perfectly ordered stripes and shapes interrupting a wild, unpredictable landscape.

Bright and early

I’m generally a morning person—especially when it comes to sketching. But I live at 47 degrees north latitude, where for months at a time, being a morning person means spending a lot of time in the dark. Right now I’m still shaking off that lazy Northwest winter-mode version of “early,” where 8 am still feels like the crack of dawn. Now that we’re racing toward the summer solstice, “early” means something much different. If I want to make more sketches like this one (where, I might add, I had to drive for an hour just to reach that location!)—well, I’m clearly going to have to whip myself back into shape.