Washington: Seattle

For our second family vacation this spring, I bring Jane and Jordan on a lengthy trip to Washington State, partially to poke around the Emerald City and its environs, but mainly, to show Jordan some mountains and big trees. Jane has never spent any time around Cascadia, so it’s also an opportunity to show her a part of the Pacific coast I became quite fond of during my younger-year travels, alongside two more recent photography trips to coastal Oregon and maritime British Columbia. For Jordan, it’s his second big plane ride in as many months (seemingly hot off the heels of our Iceland road trip), and he’s becoming quite the inveterate traveler: a little grumpy when he misses his nap (again he refuses to sleep a wink on the morning transcontinental flight, which required us to be up at 4 AM local time, 1 AM Pacific time), but overall a cheery fellow who’s happy to see new places. He’s been talking up a storm about the goddamn Space Needle, so at least we’ll be able to scratch that off his list.

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May 16, 2026: After some playtime in the children’s play-port in Boston Logan’s Terminal C, we board a long JetBlue flight with rather buggy in-flight entertainment. Jordan makes it through by peeking at the screens one row in front of us. One long wait at baggage claim and shuttle bus ride to the rental car facility, we’re all sleepy, and I’m also hungry and grouchy. Jordan passes out as soon as he hits the car seat; we drive our Dodge Hornet to Alki Beach in West Seattle, where we finally decompress by the Puget Sound with a basket of food and a peach smoothie from Alki Spud Fish & Chips. After killing some time at the local playground, we drive into the city and settle into our Capitol Hill apartment - home for the week. Jordan is fascinated by the five-story two-bedroom vertical setup. Jane and I are horrified. He climbs to the top and asks us to carry him back down.

May 17, 2026: Up early thanks to jetlag, we head out to Bakery Nouveau for a second breakfast of massive twice-baked croissants. Jordan really enjoys his ham-and-egg breakfast croissant; we eat al fresco in the abandoned courtyard of the nearby Kaiser Permanente hospital. Afterward, more walking and figuring out the local playgrounds. In the mid-morning, we drive over the 520 bridge to the Eastside to play at Remlinger Farms. Poor Jordan doesn’t fall asleep until the last five minutes of the car ride, and is a total grumpfest until he gradually warms to the farm animals, the rainbow bouncepad, and the red choo-choo train. In a fit of inspiration, he asks to ride the rainbow drop ride, completely atypical for our conservative and risk-averse kiddo. Jane winds up with a hilarious phone video (her laughing as Jordan and I get dropped, Jordan yelling out “I’m scary I’m scary!”). The ride operator thankfully lets us stop the ride after a minute. Weeks later, Jordan won’t stop talking about the rainbow ride and wanting to watch the video. We head back to Seattle after a lunch of pizza and burgers and a train ride around the farm.

May 18, 2026: Still jetlagged, we catch the bus downtown and spend the morning at the Seattle Center, killing time in the nearby playground before ascending the Space Needle at opening time. Jordan’s still running on fumes so we catch the monorail and subway back to Capitol Hill to give him a decent home lunch and, finally, a proper nap; in the meantime, I grab a Dick’s burger/fries/shake and take a stroll around Capitol Hill. I spend much of the early afternoon visiting the cats (and buying two books) at Twice Sold Tales. In the evening, we head downtown again to walk around Pike Place Market (quite the weird vibe when everything’s closing for the day) and the waterfront. Jordan gets a little scared of the animatronic Bigfoot at Miner’s Landing, but he (again) won’t stop talking about Bigfoot for the rest of the trip (much to the amusement of our motel proprietor in Forks the following week). I use the 70-200 lens to photograph afternoon light across the Puget Sound. We scrounge up dinner at the Korean grocery store near our apartment.

May 19, 2026: We drive north to Carkeek Park, passing through the neighborhoods of Green Lake and Broadview; we get a taste of weekday rush-hour traffic. At the park, Jordan enjoys sliding down the giant salmon slide nestled among coniferous trees, and we watch the morning run of the Amtrak Cascades up to Vancouver, which passes right by the nearby beach. Jordan claps enthusiastically as the train drivers give him a few blasts of the horn. On the beach, Jordan spots a dead crab, and we teach him about barnacles, kelp, and limpets. Along our way back home, we stop to visit the troll in Fremont (another thing he won’t stop talking about), and play at the Gas Works Park by Lake Union. In the early evening, we head out to explore Capitol Hill and eat a fantastic happy-hour dinner at Momiji. More playground time at Cal Anderson Park, then home. I go out at night to walk the neighborhood and shoot more windows for my evening series.

May 20, 2026: Another day, another spot of urban greenery. We head out to Discovery Park in the Magnolia neighborhood, and Jordan plays in the local playground, and we walk through the impressive forest trails in the southeastern corner of the park. We stop at Ella Bailey Park on the way home (another playground, this time with impressive views of the city skyline to the south). I scrounge up a final grocery store lunch for us as we clean the fridge and prepare to leave the city the next morning. Jane and I celebrate our ninth wedding anniversary with a thoroughly mediocre salmon dinner at Ivar’s Salmon House. We stop by Volunteer Park at dusk to admire the flora; I climb the old water tower for the views.

May 21, 2026: After one last hurrah at this week’s morning ritual (waking up super early, climbing to the top floor of the apartment with Jordan and letting him bang on a yoga ball to his heart’s content (“Drum-pin!” he yells), we pack up and head out in the morning to catch the 11 AM ferry to Bainbridge Island. We will miss not having downstairs neighbors. Jordan is stunned by the concept of driving our rental car onto a boat. Mt. Rainier makes a hazy appearance; with the compression from the 70-200, the mountain appears to veritably loom over West Seattle and Alki Beach, where we started our trip.

Washington: Olympic National Park

The trip continues with a big road-trip around the Olympic Peninsula. I’ve spent all of a half-day here before (on a family vacation back in college), so I’m quite excited to see mountains, lakes, and forests, which are my natural jam as a woodland-heavy landscape photographer. Along the way, we’ll visit some of the most astounding temperate rainforests in the world, check a second national park off of Jordan’s lifetime list, and have a really relaxing time hanging out with a toddler who increasingly believes (and adamantly states) that he’ll never have to go back to school. Maybe for our own sakes, we almost start to believe him.

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May 21, 2026: Off the Bainbridge Island ferry, we immediately stop at Hi-Life, an island poke shop where we grab huge bowls of fish and rice, along with a strawberry Calpico for the little man. An amazing meal, and probably the best we’ve had so far all trip. Jordan insists that I sit with him, which means Jane makes the long drive up to Port Angeles while I play entertainer and Spotify DJ in the back; again, despite the nearly two-hour car ride, he refuses to sleep. We grab groceries for the next several days at the local Safeway, then head further west to the southern shore of Lake Sutherland, where we’ll be staying in a lakeside cabin for three nights. Jordan enjoys running around on the cabin’s lower dock and throwing rocks into the water. I kick back and open a quart of peach ice cream to enjoy with the views. I grill salmon for dinner that turns out far tastier than the nonsense we had at Ivar’s the previous night. In the evening, I camp out on the back deck and take some hand-held stills of the lights in the distant houses across the lake.

May 22, 2026: In the morning, we return to Port Angeles and ascend the long and winding road up to Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. Jordan hikes with us, faring impressively on the short but at times steep climb through the forest up to Sunrise Point, where we are afforded astounding views of the Olympic Range, and distant views east to the Cascades and northward into British Columbia. Back at the car, we encounter a friendly marmot hoping to munch on some car parts. We coast back downhill into town (out of boredom I’m trying to conserve mileage-per-gallon on our hybrid Dodge, and manage it make it nearly the whole 17 miles without touching the gas pedal). We poke around the Olympic visitor center for awhile (Jordan roleplaying a ranger) before getting an early lunch and drinks at Aloha Smoothies in Port Angeles. Jordan sleeps like a champion (as do we all). We do not go out again.

May 23, 2026: Off in the other direction now, we continue west and drive past Lake Crescent, into the Sol Duc rainforest. We take a really beautiful walk to Sol Duc Falls (Jordan makes it half a mile before asking to ride on our shoulders). On the way back, Jordan and I play a game where we must take turns greeting hikers coming in the opposite direction. He does decently well with this, except some of his greetings are less than polite (such as roaring like a lion or a dinosaur). Back at the car, we insist he uses the porta-potty before we drive back out of the forest. We retrace our route, stopping by the Lake Crescent Lodge to explore around the lakeshore before returning to our house. Again a monster nap. We spend the afternoon and evening watching TV and enjoying the back porch.

May 24, 2026: The road trip continues now. We pack up the house and continue west to the Pacific Ocean. Here at Rialto Beach, it’s a madhouse as Memorial Day weekend is in full swing. We find a spot beyond the massive driftwood logs to hunker down and eat a packed picnic lunch of turkey-and-cheese sandwiches. Jordan gets a little hangry and tantrums himself to tears when he realizes that his sandwich is not pre-cut in half. I tend to his emotions while Jane somehow materializes a plastic knife from the bowels of her backpack (exactly reflecting our two different parenting styles). Leaving the beach, we continues south into Forks, where we show Jordan the nearby playground (replete with an old, lumber-hauling diesel train engine that fascinates him). We check in early to our comfy ground-floor room at the Pacific Inn Motel, and Jordan gets up to his usual hotel room shenanigans (jumping on the bed, inventing games to play, and asking for TV time) while Jane and I take turns going out for drinks (at nearby Mocha Motion) and take-out Mexican dinner (unclear where Jane ultimately sourced this from). We go to bed super early, in anticipation of an early start toward the Hoh Rainforest.

May 25, 2026: Finally, after over a week in the Pacific Northwest, we have a rainy day; fittingly, we are in the rainiest single place in the contiguous United States. It’s pouring as we go through the Mocha Motion drive-thru for breakfast, head out of Forks, and turn off on the long drive up the Hoh River and into one of the densest temperate rainforests in the world, at the seaward foot of the Olympic Range. We arrive at the trailheads in a downpour; Jane breaks out her poncho and I don my rain gear and backpack cover. We force Jordan into his astronaut rain boots and he is a grump-fest the entire way up to the Hall of Mosses (seriously, when has this child ever complained about puddles and mud before?). By the end of the loop trail, he’s enjoying the mosses and the enormous spruce, fir, and cedar trees - from the comfort of Mama’s shoulders. This rainforest is on a different level of age and complexity than the other old-growth forests I visited in 2024. The national park infrastructure means it lacks some of the wildness and mysticism of a place like Eden Grove (Vancouver Island), but I can still appreciate how magnificent it is as an ecosystem and as a visual subject. We have our family photo taken in the Hall of Mosses before retreating to the car. From here, it’s a long drive back to the coast. The driving rain continues on-and-off throughout the morning, so we only make brief pit stops at Ruby Beach and the Kalaloch Lodge before zooming to our day’s last destination at Quinault Lake. Jane and Jordan take a photo with the Quinault Lake Spruce (the world’s largest Sitka spruce) while my camera gear gets increasingly water-logged. We dry off at the Quinault Lake Lodge, eat lunch, and idle away the mid-afternoon by the lodge fireplace and down on its lawn before we are able to check in to our room for the night. I head out in the evening to take long shots of the mist rolling between the trees across the lake.

May 26, 2026: The final full day of our trip. We hike the Quinault Rainforest Trail in the morning, and bid farewell to the big trees. Jordan enjoys playing peak-a-boo through the hollow of a massive, fallen nurse log. It’s a quiet weekday morning, and it feels like the three of us have the forest to ourselves; Jordan asks us to hold hands to finish the trail, and we wind up crab-walking laterally where the trail is too narrow to walk three abreast. I take the wheel to complete our drive around and off the Peninsula; we stop by Huckle-Bearies Espresso & Bake Shop for breakfast drinks and goodies before continuing eastward to Olympia and the Hands On Children Museum for the remainder of the morning. We grab lunch at a nearby food truck park; Jordan eats so much rice and beans that he barfs in the parking lot and promptly (finally) falls asleep on the last stretch of the drive, to Tacoma. We arrive at the Silver Cloud Inn on the Tacoma waterfront in the mid-afternoon, and Jane and I sit and play phone games in the car to let him sleep properly. He wakes up to the horn of a passing freight train (perhaps the only time in Jordan’s life that he was happy to be woken up from a nap before ready). He spends the rest of the afternoon watching trains, which seem to go by nearly hourly from the window of our comfy hotel room. Jane takes advantage of the free laundry in our hotel and gets a head start on post-vacation chores. We go to bed early and head back to SeaTac the next morning for our flight back to Boston.

Vancouver Island: The Heart of the Raincoast

“And yet, Canadian forests always felt haunted to me, especially by my ancestors, the ones who’d defended the land or conquered it, who came to cut, burn, and farm the trees. It seems the forest always remembers. Even when we’d like it to forget our transgressions.”

— Prof. Suzanne Simard
Finding the Mother Tree

The final week of May 2024. My second trip in as many seasons to the Cascadian bioregion, after February’s road trip down the coast of Oregon. Thanks to my personality, planning style, and philosophy of travel, many of the adventures I write about here are “a long time coming.” But, this tour of Vancouver Island’s southern, central, and west coast regions takes the entire cake, and the candles too. Some of my favorite landscape photographers, the inspirations who pushed me down this path over a decade ago, hail from beautiful British Columbia, and I have long wanted to see their scenes and follow in their creative footsteps. This trip was dreamt of in 2018, delayed by the COVID pandemic, sketched out in 2021, fully booked for May 2022 (flights, hotels, car and ferries, and COVID testing appointments all) before being abruptly cancelled by my leg injury one week before our departure. Now, two years later, I finally pull the trigger and make the trip out alone, “on assignment” to document some of the Island’s beautiful old-growth forests and coastal scenes - before they are changed forever by time, tourism, and the forestry industry that is so central to the provincial economy. Part of me is pained to experience this place for the first time without Jane or Jordan (at least, the first time since a brief port-of-call stop in Victoria during college), but another part of me is glad for the solitude - the freedom to range, get deeply lost in my thoughts, and keep only the mist and rain for company. Solitude is a rarity these days, and I have learned to cherish it and experience it more intentionally than I did in my younger years. Furthermore, this trip was on the bucket list, and the bucket list, I’ve decided, stops for nothing and no one. Although I’d originally sketched out a weeklong trip to include some time on the Lower Mainland, work and home commitments abbreviate things a bit. Instead, I spend four days focusing my attention on the Island. Bookended by air travel days, I drive from Victoria down to Port Renfrew on Sunday, complete the Pacific Marine Drive and head west to Pacific Rim National Park on Monday, spend Tuesday exploring the west coast, and return through Alberni Valley to the south-central Island on Wednesday before flying home on Thursday. It’s a whirlwind - an unforgettable one.

It starts with an exhausting travel day which sees me leaving home around noon on Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, eating a shawarma airport dinner in Toronto, and then boarding a delayed flight to Victoria (oh Air Canada…). We land a couple of airplane movies and indigenous short films later, and I’m surprised to find the rental car counter still open. I head out to find my car, a notably low-slung and sleek Dodge Charger GT, before making the 5-minute drive to nearby Sidney, where I check-in at the Best Western Emerald Isle just past midnight (3 AM Boston time… thank goodness I had the foresight to book a place so close to the airport). A shower, a quick email home to let Jane know I’m safely in Canada, and I pass out.

The next morning, I eat breakfast in the hotel and walk across the street to Thrifty Foods for some basic groceries (bread, fruit, juice, canned veggies) before heading out on the highway. My destination for the day is Port Renfrew, where I plan to spend the night after exploring the beaches and forests along the southern coast and the Juan de Fuca Strait. In the morning, I pass through Sooke and follow the coastline westward, watching the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula rising in the distance across the strait. Along the way, I make stops at China Beach and Sombrio Beach. It’s an impressively rainy and moody day - not great for wide landscapes, but not bad for forest photography, which benefits from atmospheric mist and low-contrast light to provide calm and order in otherwise chaotic scenes. Having gotten a lot of practice in Oregon (and nearly caused the death of my camera screen from being drenched in the redwoods), I stick to a rain discipline regimen that includes mounting an umbrella to my backpack’s shoulder strap so that I can shoot with both hands, keeping my camera tucked safely in my rain gear at all times when walking, and extensively previsualizing scenes and dialing in settings before taking the camera body out of my jacket.

On short walks down to the beach at both China and Sombrio, I take my time despite the pouring rain, admiring the tall trees, the coastal scenery, and the flora of the understory (including the ubiquotous salal and a variety of blooming wildflowers). At Sombrio Beach, I take a longer walk down the beach to visit a waterfall that flows into a creek, which drains into the ocean. Reaching the waterfall requires a bit of bushwhacking and scrambling along the creek-bank, and not a small amount of walking upstream in the water. My old, leaky boots get soaked; my feet and socks are destined to be damp for the rest of the day (and indeed, the majority of the trip). But that’s how it goes on the rainy coast of British Columbia.

A little further along the coast, I reach Port Renfrew, a small community on the shores of the inlet of Port San Juan. It’s a quiet little place that barely rises to being called a town — a collection of houses, a gas station, a few hostels, lodges, and diners, where services are lacking and cell reception is spotty at best. In other words, it’s idyllic and it’s utterly perfect. Before I can rest though, I have a long journey to make into the mountains north of town, in the Gordon River Valley. In a way, the entire trip has been built around my desire to see this place - the stands of ancient, old-growth forest that remain on Edinburgh Mountain and its environs, and specifically the parcel of wild climactic forest called Eden Grove, which is being actively threatened by logging interests. I have heard Eden Grove described by photographers and forestry ecologists alike as one of the finest old-growth forests in the world, let alone Canada, and I wanted to finally see it with my own eyes. It is, in a word, the fulcrum of the trip.

After a brief stop at the beach near Pacheedaht First Nation (“People of the Sea Foam”) land, where Scotch broom carpets the dunes in golden flowers, I begin the bumpy gravel drive up into the mountains. It’s only seven or so miles from the asphalt to my destination at the foot of Edinburgh Mountain, but the logging road is atrocious at times, especially in this rainstorm, which has transformed the gravel surface into a series of rutted-out puddles. Not wanting to risk my low-clearance car and not knowing how deep each of these puddles is, I take things nice and slow up the mountain, zigging and zagging and dodging as I go. After turning off from Gordon River Road to the Edinburgh Main, I leave my car just before the bridge across the Gordon River. It’s raging and torrential in the downpour, and water is cascading down the sides of the mountain in braids and rivulets. At the entrance to the bridge, as if to mark the liminal space between the rest of our world and someplace truly special, are three words spray-painted in bright orange by a prior activist: “Defend the Sacred”. In the distance, garguantuan trees tower above the mist upon the mountainside.

Donning my gear, I leave the car and walk through the pouring rain up the mountainside. I am completely alone, and as far as I can tell, I might as well be the only human being between here and seven miles away in the relative civilization of Port Renfrew. Personal safety is paramount. I told Jane in advance that I would completely out-of-reach for at least a few hours, but if anything were to happen, help would be a long time coming. Just past the bridge and around another bend, the road transforms from pitted gravel to a series of blast craters steeply climbing upward - impassable to all but the toughest 4x4 vehicles - but it is not so bad on foot. In a way, I am glad to be taking the last steps in my pilgrimage to this place on foot, in abysmal weather conditions. Just as during my redwoods exploration in February, I find myself thinking that any other weather would have felt totally inappropriate to the ecosystem. The rolling clouds and endless mists also provide a perfect backdrop for photos, accentuating the trees and making their massive size stand out clearly against the distant hillsides and the funeral-shroud-of-a-sky. After a brief uphill walk (less than a mile from road bridge), I reach an open cutblock that has been planted over with young firs, and come face-to-face with the sole survivor of the clearcut: Big Lonely Doug, Canada’s second tallest Douglas Fir. I take a series of verts, panoramas, and telephoto shots here, playing with ways to frame Doug along with the distant trees. To the east (my left), I see my first glimpse of Eden Grove, a disarmingly tall and wild jumble of trees, standing like a monstruous wall over the young fir trees in the clearing. A little further up the road, and past an enormous roadside waterfall, I reach the trail that leads into the grove.

How can I describe Eden Grove in words? If standing among California and Oregon’s coastal redwoods in February was like swimming in a pod of whales, then walking through Eden Grove would be like scuba-diving in a perfect coral reef. I visit other old-growth forests over the subsequent few days, but none of them comes close to the scale and beauty of this little slice of surviving forest. A short boardwalk trail leads through the grove, old and worn enough to blend into the surroundings. Each way I look, I see massive trees - Douglas firs and western redcedars twenty feet or more in diameter and soaring hundreds of feet beyond view above me. The rainstorm is continuing to rage, but the dense canopy shields me from the sky, turning the rain into a fine mist that lands on the understory. The boardwalk ends in a massive redcedar, over thirty feet across and draped in ferns and lichen. A veritable great-grandmother of the forest, whose root system and mycorrhizal networks have likely given rise to more life than we can fathom. I take lots of compositions, mostly handheld, of my surroundings. Scale is totally lost in these photos; the best I can do is to try to capture the mood - the emotional experience of being in this beautiful grove. I feel so utterly surrounded by life and beauty that I I find myself talking - really, for the first time all day since the grocery store in the morning. Talking to myself, talking to the trees. Wanting to thank them for being here, for shielding my steps, for letting me visit their home of over a thousand years, for giving a tiny struggling human being just an hour of perfect peace. It occurs to me that they will outlast us - trees like this. Maybe not Eden Grove, and maybe not many other groves of old-growth forest. But trees like this will outlast us. They will be here - or make their return - when we are gone. They will be fine. It will all be alright. Back above the grove, I walk a mile back down the logging road to my car at the bridge. Along the road, on gravel piles, on concrete barriers, and along the bridge railing, are spray-painted dueling visions of the earth:

“Water is Life”
“Doug Needs Friends ❤️”
“Fuck the Company”
”Defend Our Home”
“Fuck the Blockade”

Long live the blockade.

After a steady and peaceful if incredibly bumpy drive back into Port Renfrew, I check into my accommodations for the evening - a hiker’s bungalow located just off the road. After unpacking and unfurling my wet clothes, socks, and boots in the bathroom to dry (a blower fan is provided, thank goodness), I make dinner (ramen of course…) and eat and rest while my camera batteries and mental batteries recharge. I check in with Jane, who has just put Jordan to sleep on the other side of the continent. After a brief liedown on the bunk-bed, I head back out for a late sunset loop hike at nearby Botanical Beach. The skies are still morose and cloudy, so golden light is out of the question, but I nevertheless have an enjoyable time on the beach, shooting the tidepools, the distant Olympic Peninsula, and the windblown pines and rocky islets in Botany Bay. On my way back into town, I exercise a bit of spontaneity and stop at the nearby marina, walking out onto the water to photograph the inlet at blue hour, along with the lights of the town diner in the distance against a backing of misty trees and foggy mountains. It is a mesmerizing scene, and a perfect way to cap this day of exploring the heart of the raincoast - a day that I am in no hurry to forget anytime soon. I’m back at the bungalow just after 9 PM, and off to sleep before long.