mmegaera: (flowers)
[personal profile] mmegaera
So. There was this quilt show. In Sequim, which is on the Olympic Peninsula. It's an annual event, part of the Lavender Festival http://www.lavenderfestival.com). I took lots of pictures (I like to play with the patterns on my quilt design software), but since they're other people's quilts, I don't feel like I ought to be posting them here. Suffice to say, the show was lovely.

Sequim is only about 45 minutes from Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park, however. And it was a beautiful day, and after all, one can only spend so much time at a quilt show [g].

A number of large photos behind the cut.

Hurricane Ridge 1.jpg
This is looking across from the walkway behind the visitor center. The large white flowers are cow parsnips. The glorious mountains are the Olympics.

avalanche lilies.jpg
These are avalanche lilies (the white ones are avalanche lilies, the yellow ones I saw at Sunrise a couple of weeks ago are glacier lilies, and someday I will learn to keep them straight), photographed along the trail that goes up the hill across the parking lot from the visitor center. I was surprised to see them this late in the season, but they were on a north-facing, shaded slope, which probably explains why I did.

columbine.jpg
A red Sitka columbine, some blue lupine (which was everywhere, as you'll see in the other pictures), and yellow broadleaf arnica, aka "another small yellow composite family critter." There were probably eight or nine different species of small yellow composites among the several dozen kinds of wildflowers I saw yesterday.

heather and lupine.jpg
Red heather and more lupine (I said it was everywhere). I've never seen such a huge patch of heather in the wild like that. It was gorgeous. Near there was a wild rhododendron, the small cream-colored flowers of which did not photograph well, alas. This was on the way up to the viewpoint.

deer.jpg
A young buck deer was grazing in the middle of the day, which was odd (they're usually crepuscular). There was another, older buck, too, but he was more wary, and moved too fast for the lag time on my camera.

Hurricane Ridge 2.jpg
The view from the top. Visitor center and parking lot dwarfed by mountains and meadows.

field of lupine.jpg
As I said, lots of lupine. It almost looked as if chunks of sky had been broken off and dumped in the meadow. Looking back up towards the viewpoint from about halfway back down to the visitor center.

tigerlilies, etc.jpg
About a mile or so back down the road headed home, I noticed some Columbian tigerlilies blooming by the roadside, so I stopped to take their picture. Along with the lilies, that's red-orange paintbrush, more cow parsnips, white pussytoes (I love that name), purple thistle, and some unidentifiable-at-this-distance yellow composite.

across the strait to Victoria.jpg
There's a viewpoint about halfway back down to Port Angeles, where on a clear day (like this one) you can see across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island and Victoria. If it had been an even clearer day, I'd have been able to see Mount Baker over towards the right in the distance, too. I have seen it from there in past years.

lavender.jpg
As I said, the quilt show was part of the Lavender Festival in Sequim. On my way home I stopped at one of the many lavender farms in the area and took some more pictures. It's really too bad the picture doesn't show the lavender rippling in the wind (it was very windy at sea level, and barely breezy up at Hurricane Ridge -- odd) like a haymeadow. It was gorgeous. And smelled every bit as good as it looked.

And so home.
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