Tag Archives: Hurricane Ridge

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Numbers game

For Judy’s The Numbers Game #9: 130.

Photographs with the number 130. From small things to large. First, a butterfly. August, 2022, on a hike on Hurricane Ridge.

Biking on the east coast. I biked with my oxygen concentrator.

East coast forest, Maryland.

Back the Pacific Northwest. Snow on the north face in the Olympic Mountains.

Hurricane Ridge, looking southwest.

Hurricane Ridge again, layers of Olympic mountains and clouds.

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Surreal surroundings

It was so gorgeous up on Hurricane Ridge yesterday! I think the wildflowers are surreal: whole mountainsides of wildflowers and the more you look, the more different ones you see. I am just starting to learn their names.

https://www.nps.gov/olym/planyourvisit/visiting-hurricane-ridge.htm

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: surreal.

I think the orange flower is a paintbrush, but it is not showing up here, on the wildflower identification site.

Another site: https://www.intangibility.com/inw/Wildflowers/Indian-Paintbrush.html

If anyone can identify it more closely, let me know!

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Hurricane Ridge

Yesterday I woke to low clouds and slight sky spitting. A friend and I drove up to Hurricane Ridge and climbed Hurricane Hill. I am delighted that I can do it without oxygen! I get short of breath if I climb AND try to talk. He had to do most of the talking.

We drove out of the cloud as we got to Port Angeles and it was just gorgeous on top of Hurricane Ridge. There were lots of people up there. Tons of wildflowers, too and views of the Olympic Mountains. At the top we were looking at Vancouver Island and Canada to the north across the strait. A beautiful climb and a beautiful day.

For Cee’s Flower of the Day.

https://www.nps.gov/olym/planyourvisit/visiting-hurricane-ridge.htm

I think this is Oregon Sunshine, Eriophyllum lanatum, or else it’s an arnica. There are a lot of yellow wildflowers, here.

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H is for Helen and Hurricane Ridge

I am blogging A to Z about artists, particularly women artists and mostly about my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway.

H is for Helen and Hurricane Ridge. Here is one of her water colors.

My mother loved water colors. I think she loved them best of all the art techniques she did. Etchings and water colors were the two most important.

She wanted to move to the Pacific Northwest for years, but she and my father were worried about moving my grandmother, Katherine White Burling. Katy B. died while I was in residency at OHSU in Family Practice, in 1994. My parents then spent at least a year dealing with the will and two houses and stuff and also looking for the right place. They drove all over the northwest. My mother liked the rain and gardening and art. My father wanted sailboats and singing and music. At last they called me and my sister: Chimacum, Washington. “We found a house in Chimacum.”

My sister Chris and I both replied, “WHERE?”

We said to each other that we were mildly horrified that they were selling “our” house in Alexandria, Virginia, though we really had only lived there from when I was 14 and she was 11. My sister had worked for the US Forest Service and lived in Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula, so she knew the area much better than I did. I finished residency in Portland in 1996 and moved to Colorado. Shortly after that my parents moved to Chimacum, Washington.

My mother lived four years after they moved. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1997 and died on May 15, 2000. This is one of her northwest watercolors. I am glad that she had time to do some, though I wish that she had more time.

Here is the Hurricane Ridge park information: https://www.nps.gov/olym/planyourvisit/visiting-hurricane-ridge.htm. Be careful, though, because the park is big and wild and it can be dangerously wet and cold. People are more likely to die of exposure if they get lost than from a cougar or bear. Take some emergency gear if you hike, because the park is very big and wild. My sister wrote about duncehead expeditions, where people camp with inadequate gear. She mostly worked trail crew for the US Forest Service, but they did search and rescue as well. My sister died of cancer as well. Her blog is here: http://e2grundoon.blogspot.com/ .

ATOZBLOGGINGCHALLENGE2022 #art #Women artists #Helen Burling Ottaway #ATOZCHALLENGE

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Hurricane Ridge

This is my mother’s biggest watercolor painting. I have it hanging in my guest room. It is huge and gorgeous, nearly the width of the double bed.

I miss her. Helen Burling Ottaway. I will put more of her artwork up. She died in 2000, but I still have the art.