There Are No Roads To This Place

I am participating in Art in the AM at the Lewes Library on January 14, 2026.  I thought it would be fun to share some photos from the hike to Lake Twenty Two in the Cascades.  I couldn't include them in my presentation on the art that I created from this adventure.

These were my comments to the group.

The title of this work is “Alpine Oasis” but it could have been:  “There Are No Roads To This Place”…..

I was trained in and work in classical realism.  Realism requires an intimate relationship with your subject.  Realism is labor intensive and has exacting standards.  My finished pieces are the result of careful execution, many studies and sometimes months of work.  My goal for this piece was “Painterly Realism”.

When I work from reference photographs they are my own.  They help me form an understanding of my subject, BUT I also need to walk around that lake, to touch those trees, to see the light playing on the water and to feel the cold air on my face.  Walking around this lake involved hiking a long distance out and back to reach it…..there are no roads to this place.  This was a serious hike over very rugged, remote mountainous terrain.

  

I often work the same scene in more than one media as a way of forming that intimate relationship with my subject.  Colored pencil is very unforgiving and I did many drawings and thumbnail sketches before I started this work. There is a lot of information in this scene.

This landscape immediately appealed to me as a great study in aerial perspective.  I loved the color and subtle movement of the water and the reflections of the trees on the far bank.  Those were important elements I wanted to capture.  I wanted to convey the green beauty of this place and also the harshness of the environment with the dead trees.  Trees apparently don’t live long here.  The most important element of all was the quiet peacefulness of this place.

Howard Pyle once said “project your mind into the subject until you actually live in it.  Throw your heart into the picture and then jump in after it.”  

When I look at this drawing I can still smell the trees and feel the cold air on my face.  I hear the waterfalls and remember how peaceful it was.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

We chose this hike on the suggestion of someone who hadn't been there but had heard that it was beautiful and a moderate difficulty hike.  We read the trail reviews beforehand and took a printed trail map with us because we were told cell phone reception was "spotty".  What that really meant was there was no cell phone reception...

We started the hike at around 9:30 AM.  You immediately get a sense of what is to come with the rocks and water everywhere.  We begin at around 1000 feet in the rainforest.  Water spills out of the side of the mountain.  The trail is stunningly beautiful.

We reach the first crossing of real water.  A wooden bridge built and maintained by the Washington Trails Association.  The volume of water is amazing.  It's late June and most of the snow has already melted.  Or so we thought.  A little farther up, the first of many waterfalls.  The last photo is about an hour into the hike.  So far not too challenging for us.

 

Everywhere the trail might be hard to navigate, the WTA has built stairs.  This next waterfall was so huge I couldn't see the top of it.  The sound was deafening there was so much water.  We reach another set of stairs climbing, and more climbing...  And then we came to the landslide...

This was the first place where we realized the difficulty of this hike.  We'd read before the trip about a landslide and thought this was it.  We got above the landslide on all fours holding onto whatever we could grab.  Mud everywhere.  The trail was gone.  We got through that difficulty and came to a spectacular clearing.  After that, the REAL landslide.  Boulders the size of a VW beetle in places.  If you weren't watching your footing, you could get into trouble.  It was around 11 AM by now.

Thankfully the WTA had accurate reports of how long and difficult this part of the hike was.  We knew it would eventually end.  Still picking our way through it.  And then another unbelievable view.  And Mountain columbine along the path.  

It was after 11:30 at this point.  We were taking a rest and making decisions about whether to continue when some young people came bounding down the mountain and stopped to check in on us.  We asked them if it was worth it to continue on and how much farther we had to go.  The gleefully told us we were nearly there and that we couldn't quit now!  We were not the oldest people on the trail that day but we'd never done this hike before and wanted to make sure we weren't getting in over our heads.  We still had to get back down.  Fifteen minutes later we were there!

There is a boardwalk to the glacier.  The ecosystem here is fragile.  You can hike around the lake but some of that involves hiking on the glacier.  We decided against it since we didn't have ice cleats and there was significant melting of the snow.  Falling into an ice crevasse wasn't my idea of a good time.

Our friend visited this location several weeks later after hearing our story of the hike.  Their response to us afterwards was "OH MY GOD!  I CAN'T BELIEVE I SENT YOU TO THAT PLACE!  It wasn't that bad, really.......

A huge thank you to the Washington Trails association for making this possible.  They are an all volunteer organization that maintains trails, makes maps and has a website with current information about all the trails in Washington State.