The morning hours became blended with the night and before I knew it, the alarm was sounding the 01:50am wakeup that had been set less than two hours before. There had been lots of things to discuss and do before Dan headed home and by the time everything had been dealt with, it was midnight...only time for an hour-and-a-half nap before getting ready to make the nearly two-hour drive to the airport. It doesn't seem like that long ago when extinuating circumsta...

From the coastline of northwestern Washington to the temperate rain forest, west of Seattle, you will find Olympic National Park. The park includes three diverse areas - the coastal region, the forests and the mountain region but also includes over over 600 islands in national wildlife refuges and five areas in the Olympic National Forest. There are nearly 75 miles of coastline designated as coastal wilderness - making it one of the longest wilderness coas...

The title picture is a distant view of the summit of Mount Rainier taken from Mt St Helens National Park on the previous day. Mount Rainier is a 14,410 foot ice-clad volcano with 35 square miles of glaciers, making it the largest single-peak glacial system in the lower 48 states and the tallest peak in the Cascade Range. It is a dormant, not extinct volcano and could conceivable erupt one day just as Mount St Helens did. The more time you spend in an area wit...

There is so much history about the volcanoes in the Cascade Volcanic Arc it's difficult to know where to start. In just the past 200 years, seven of the 13 volcanoes have erupted. Many of us are old enough to remember the destruction and devastation from Mount St Helens eruption in 1980. Since then, Mount St Helens has been one of the most studied volcanic eruptions in the arc. On May 18, 1980 within a few seconds of a 5.1 magnitude earthquake, the volcan...

Crater Lake is 1,943 feet deep and is the deepest lake in the United States; but that is not what makes this place so special. The history of how the lake was created is as dramatic as its beauty. The lake is nestled within a caldera that was formed around 7,700 years ago when a 12,000 foot volcano began to errupt; it continued to spew rock, lava and rocks of fire for nearly 30 miles until the magma chamber (located miles below the mountain) was emptied. I...