Greenwater River Cascade, Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie NF

After last weekend's hike to Green Lake, this past Sunday my wife and I tackled a longer hike (14 miles or so) to the Greenwater Lakes and Echo Lake, in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, northeast of Mount Rainier. About the first 5 miles of the hike the trail crosses back and forth across the Greenwater River over countless bridges. The entire trail seems to be a sequence of bridges and cascades over mossy green rocks. It can be easy to take this for granted living in the Pacific Northwest, but it really is quite beautiful every time.

This was taken somewhere along the trail, just as it begins to diverge from the Greenwater River to climb up to Echo Lake (which lead to a still snow-covered trail and a mostly frozen lake, in stark contrast to the scene below). Although the river was out of sight from the trail at this point, there was a distinctly loader roar of rushing water that hinted at a large cascade. We stepped off trail a little bit and saw this waterfall. Having learned my lesson from last week, I brought my tripod along on this trek. Although I didn't have room to set it up here on the steep and slippery slope, I used it as a brace or monopod to help keep things sharp. The dappled light on the moss behind it fortunately didn't blow out as I so often find it tends to do, which I was very happy to see.

This is a relatively low-elevation hike for the area and one of the first to be passable this time of year. The rest of the trail up to Echo Lake was passable, but very snowy still. Apparently it gets quite busy in summer, which is no surprise, but it was a treat to see it early and have the trail mostly to ourselves.

Nikon D90 | Nikon 18-200VR@32mm | f/16 | 1/4s | ISO100 | Monopod

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