Whether one prefers the misty, cloudy twilight for photography or the dramatic contrasts of shadow and sunlight, mid-Spring is an unsurpassedly excellent time to visit the Olympic Sculpture Park.
Rainy, a day may be, but from the Z-Path, the views are awesome of the clouds dissolving into ocean rains, or remaining on high, drifting overhead.
Among the tall pasture grasses, orange poppies proliferate, especially against the East Meadow’s heat-radiating concrete walls.
Darker colors of blue and purple Arctic lupins rise up in the meadows and Aspen Grove. Oregon sunshine and even dandelions are as yellow as anything short of a painted yellow sun.
A meadow is much more than amber waves of grain, which we have too: ambers and browns among brighter and darker hues. Not instead of green, because, greens, we have. Long, wide lawns of perfect blades of green grass.
Fireweed purple– color like that? Yes, it does deserves its whole own brand.
Snowberry green is evocative of olive. Salmonberry green is richer, with the ridges and serrated edges of that leaf. Dark and tiny are the individual greens of ground-covering kinnickinick. Long, dark and pinpointed, fronds of ferns. Of that sort of green are the leaves of Garry oak. Soft is the green of the quaking aspen tree. Softer still, red-twig dogwood. Mahonia leaves are glossy, and unabashedly prickly. To mention just a few.
Textures of leaves– as varied among these plants as their shades and colors.
Approaching the Cloud Bridge from the north, one turns right, downward onto the path along the train tracks, into a brisk ocean breeze stirring up aspen leaves, and feels, this is a lively moment, here and now.
White and gray, the clouds beyond the Olympic mountains, above Puget Sound, upon the Olympic Sculpture Park, and whether the sky be shiny or clouded, each engenders its own particular advantages for photography in the park. Or a hands-free walk.