All posts by Wilderness Walker

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

Twilight on the Hoh River

We’ve been camping along Olympic National Park’s famous Hoh River this past week, and the next few  posts will be watercolors I did out there, mostly after hikes in the late afternoon. I could have spent the time soaking my feet in the 49-degree water coming straight off the Blue Glacier, but thought better of it. It’s an amazing valley, that quintessential Rain Forest Experience, surrounded by miles of giant 250′ Sitka spruce, red-cedar and hemlock. The visitors are all pretty civilized there too. It’s as if they realize they’re in a special, almost sacred place, and treat it (and other visitors) that way. There’s a lack of amenities, to be sure, no water in the restrooms, no power, no showers, and the park store seems to always be out of our puzzles and books – but it’s also pure clean ancient forest an hour drive from the nearest stoplight. Wonderful.

And speaking of the nearest stoplight, that would be in Forks – the little bedraggled West End logging town that has fallen into a Hollywood gold mine. They should make Stephenie Meyers, or maybe Hollywood location people, the patron saints of Forks for their gift of filming the Twilight Series there. We delight driving through it nowadays, seeing every store in business and the town full of vampire-seekers (or maybe vampires themselves). I’ve never seen so many dark haired, pale makeuped teenaged girls with cameras in my life. Stores: there’s ‘Dazzled by Twilight’, and ‘Twilight Natives’, and even ‘Twilight Firewood.’ We saw a rows of girls all lined up in front of the closed-up high school, pulled over waiting their turn in front of the town sign, even photographing the Twilight Gas Station sign. Amazing!

So, here’s my Twilight take on it with this little watercolor of the Twilight on the Hoh River. Nancy says I’m trying to cash in on the Twilight Craze, but I know who has all the money – pale-skinned teenage girls, and I just know one of them will buy this. Oh, no vampires in it? Well, you never know. There could be one lerking behind one of those big spruce.

This watercolor and ink painting is on cold-press paper, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
A nice mahogany frame with a double mat and glass makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

Next time I’ll tell you about the “One Square Inch of Silence” 3.5 miles up the trail on the Hoh.

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

Otter Tracks

River Otter Tracks on the Beach are a fairly common sight around here. In fact, otters are, themselves, a really common sight right in downtown Port Townsend. Recently, there’s been a big one down there on Water Street, dodging cars, running around and looking in the open door at Gallery Nine (where both Nancy and I exhibit) – and causing all sorts of photo-opportunities for the tourists who all think they’re just wonderful. Yeah, well …

There used to be a restaurant in PoTown (my word – and Nancy thinks it might be pronounced PooTown) called The Otter Crossing, with a whole little band of otters-guys that consistently hung out underneath the building. Recently it changed hands and is now renamed something fruity and upscale. Wonder if the otters know? Wonder if the new people who bought it knew what the name meant? I walked by there recently and a stong fishy aroma was still wafting around the place, but maybe it was just low tide. Otters can be over four feet long – meaning, to put it mildly, a lot of seafood goes through them.

I’ve painted otters before, paying homage to them so they wouldn’t come aboard our boat and make a big gooey mess, but it didn’t help, didn’t deter them in the slightest. Some boaters hang little bags of weird coyote urine on their lifelines, others sneak go down at night and use their own urine here and there, still others pay huge sums of money on otter-proof netting that never really works. Sheesh. To me, they’re just part of living with nature around here, and, as we say fairly often, sometimes it isn’t easy.

Now, don’t get me going on the red squirrel babies in the attic.

This painting is watercolor and ink on watercolor paper, 7 1/2″ x 10 1/2″ and is $139 unframed.
A nice mahogany frame with a double mat, outside measurements of about 13″ x 15″  makes it a total of $179 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the website link for the new bristlecone pine. It’s been pretty popular all ready.

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Clickhere to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography. There are some nice images of our recent Glacier and Waterton National Parks visit a couple of weeks ago.

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

Hale’iwa Cottage

Back in March we stayed on Oahu’s North Shore, and now I’ve gotten around to painting a little  “thank you” watercolor for the family who graciously allowed us to stay there. The house is an interesting place, and so I thought I’d post it here. The place is about 3 miles or so north of Hale’iwa, that North Shore wide place in the road that’s famous for the shave ice, odd people and giant surfing waves. How big are the waves? Well, right down the road a local surfer was sleeping in his beach-side cabin when a rogue wave came in, smacked the place apart and he awoke to find himself behind his home, surfing up the hill on his bed. He’s lucky to tell the tale.

This little cottage, also oh-so-close to the giant waves, had its lower front windows boarded up because of the same problem. Try sleeping soundly at night with THAT knowledge running around in your head. We were told the place was originally an old WW2 army barracks that was moved here after the war, then remodeled endless times to become a truly old-Hawaii experience. This means it’s a mixture of everything that’s available yet nothing that’s entirely permanent. Nothing fancy, no granite countertops, just a tidy little place like the summer cabins I stayed in as a kid. There’s a long sand beach just down the block where green sea turtles haul out to rest, but the ‘beach’ out front is mostly lava rocks and remnants of an ancient coral reef when sea levels were a bit higher.

For the most part, the entire 808-State (Hawaii area code) isn’t like this anymore. You have to really look for the old Hawaii Nancy and I love – but it’s still here in bits and pieces. The family who remains true to this small and simple old place on the beach is pretty savy, I think, of realizing how to enjoy life.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Here’s a link to our new Bristlecone Pine jigsaw puzzle.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography. New images from her Glacier National Park trip are featured. Bears, peaks, loons and foxes, oh my.

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

Penstemons in the Alpine

 

While we had an amazingly warm winter, the warmest on record, it’s now Junuary in the Northwest. There is still TOO MUCH SNOW in the Olympics for any descent hiking, and we were just over in Glacier National Park in Montana, and the Going-to-the-Sun Road is STILL closed with 20′ drifts in the upper pass.  It’s driving us crazy, and I’m eager, no, almost frantic, to get into some summertime alpine meadows again.

I want to sit down on these rocks next to this little stream (wherever it is) and listen to the sounds of the slow-moving bumblebees making the rounds of spring alpine flowers. I want to take it in, each subtle color and texture on every alpine sedge and lichen, flower or glacier-smooth rock with its Ice Age grooves aiming downhill. Smells, those alpine smells – flower perfume of paintbrush and cornlily. Sour aroma of Sitka valerian. The tangy bittersweet of alpine willow in sun. You know this stuff too, or should, and once you’re bitten by the alpine meadow bug, winters become unbearably longer and hiking books burden your shelves. At least it does at our place.

Penstemons  – This original painting is watercolor and ink, 6″ x 9″ and $125 unframed.
A dark mahogany double-matted frame makes it a total of $149 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

I left this out of the last post, but if you’d like a direct link to buy the new Bristlecone Pine puzzle, here it is.

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

Bristlecone Pines Jigsaw Puzzle

Bristlecone Pines puzzle box

Bristlecone Pines – The Trees That Rewrote History
 NEW jigsaw puzzle

I was commissioned for this new mural by the Crater Lake Institute, a most forward-thinking and generous bunch.  This painting is one I’ve wanted to do for years, and now, with the mural complete, we’ve also created a puzzle of the image.

If you don’t know, and many people don’t, bristlecone pines are high elevation mountaintop trees of the Great Basin in remote areas of Nevada, eastern California and Utah. I think they’re the most beautiful trees on the planet, and the starkness of their high-elevation surroundings just adds to their appeal. We’ve studied them in Bryce Canyon and Great Basin National Parks, and the famous Schulman Grove in the White Mountains east of Bishop, CA on Forest Service lands. In all these places, we’ve felt a reverence, an almost religious experience in even casually walking among these ancient trees. How ancient? Well, some still-living trees have been dated to having begun their living journey from a small seed almost 5000 years ago, making them the oldest single plant species on the entire planet. Branches and downed trees have been dated to almost twice that age, and have helped scientists better understand climate data since the Ice Age. That’s what the title, “The Trees that Rewrote History” refers to. With few wildfires and a high-desert arid climate , downed bristlecone wood stays around. To put this into a perspective we can maybe grasp better, these trees began life when there were woolly mammoths walking around North America!

Now, I just have to add this extra bit because it’s eaten at me for decades, and made educating people about bristlecones with my art a mission for me. This is a direct quote from Wikipedia: “In the Snake Range of eastern Nevada Donald R. Currey, a student of the University of North Carolina, was taking core samples of bristlecones in 1964. He discovered that “Prometheus” in a cirque below Wheeler Peak (in what is now Great Basin National Park) was over 4,000 years old. His coring tool broke, so the U.S. Forest service granted permission to cut down “Prometheus”. 4,844 rings were counted on a cross-section of the tree, making “Prometheus” at least 4,844 years old, the oldest non-clonal living thing known to man. … He never cut down another tree in his life.”

Enough said: you guys understand, and I think some of you might have actually known Mr. Currey, who died in 2004. It’s a sad tale, is it not? Why is it that we keep repeating needless destruction of this little planet? Well, I think it’s because we simply don’t appreciate something until it’s gone or screwed up beyond repair. Like Prometheus – or the Gulf wetlands we were in only six weeks ago.

So, my bristlecone image is now a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle (made of recycled materials, I might add) with a good interpretive essay on the box’s back along with a species key. You can buy it online or by email or call us at 1-888-437-2218 and we’ll ship it with an invoice. We’re trying to make it easier for readers who have difficulty with the web ordering-thing. If you’d like to bundle up several puzzles, it saves you shipping. Just tell us what you want.

Thanks for reading this week. This one meant a lot to me to finally see it in print – and it’s already selling – and educating – at some of the bristlecone parks.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

Uncategorized

Clark Island and Mount Baker

I ran across this unfinished watercolor in my studio. Clark Island is one of the more remote places in the San Juan Islands, about 40 miles north of here. Very few people ever stop here, but I sure have. Boaters all seem more interested in getting to the bars in Friday Harbor or Roche, or the beaches on Sucia Island. Nancy calls it the herding instinct.

So, I was anchored here in our little boat, just around the corner to the left, and went ashore to do this painting – it was maybe five years ago. As I sat there, I remember a single wasp landing on the water glass. And then another. And then a whole family – and then some. Well, time to leave, which I did at a somewhat rapid pace after dumping over the water with my shoe. I figured it was the fresh water they were going after. Fresh water’s actually a pretty rare commodity here on these rocky islets, and in summer it doesn’t often rain. That was enough for me to just say to myself that I’d finish this thing later.

And so I just did! Pretty fun, like I was back there again enjoying this quiet little anchorage with the wasps and a very big view of Mount Baker. And if someone asks, as they sometimes do, “just how long did it take to do this painting” I can honestly say “oh, about five years”.

This ORIGINAL painting is old watercolor and new ink on Arches paper, 10″ x 14″ and $239 unframed. (that works out to be something like $50 a year, or about $4 per month. Typical artist wages!
A nice mahogany frame that’s double-matted makes it a total of $279 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

Uncategorized

Old Fir at Fort Flagler

I’m still on this pen, ink with watercolor-thing. I recently received an email about one of these I did back in the 1970’s that someone recently purchased in an estate sale, and it jogged my memory that they were fun to do. So, we’ll go a bit more with this.

We trailer-camped beside this stately old Douglas-fir last week. We had planned on a little camp-hike into the Olympics, but rain got in the way (oh, RAIN? in the Olympics – in JUNE?), so we simply drove over to Fort Flagler on Marrowstone Island just east of here. The Rain Shadow Effect was doing its thing, and the sun was out. We could see the rain right over across Port Townsend Bay, where it stayed, but here it was clear, soft and nice, so I got busy with the paints. Long  cool later afternoon shadows, tall spring grass that hadn’t been trimmed and a few crows flying overhead.

There are lots of old-growth trees here, but here in the lee of giant mountains, they never grew huge. You can tell they’re old trees because the lowest 8 feet or so are all fire scarred and pocked with woodpecker holes. A dead giveaway. And the reason they’re still here? This is old fort was one of the many ringing Point Wilson, gateway to Puget Sound, and they guarded it from the bad guys a century ago. The forts never fired a shot in defence, but they never cut many of the trees either, preferring to use them as camouflage for the big guns. The guns were melted down and turned into tanks in the next war, and the state of Washington turned the forts into parks. A great idea, don’t you think?

This ORIGINAL painting is watercolor and ink on Arches paper, 10″ x 14″ that fits a 16″ x 20″ matted frame. It’s $239 unframed.
A dark mahogany frame with a double mat makes it a total of $279 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Next post I’ll have the new Bristlecone Pine jigsaw puzzle to brag about, so stay tuned.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was posted to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

Uncategorized

Low Tide Chimacum Creek Estuary

 

Right down the hill.

No kidding – a two-minute walk. When we moved here a decade ago, the sellers didn’t even mention it. On our first walk down the hill, we were stunned to find this place! It’s a salmon stream (thanks in part to the locals that placed hatch boxes here years ago to renew the fish), and we now get something like 1000 chum salmon each year, and they spawn right around this first bend. Coho are here too, moving upstream to nest in other areas. We can come down here on incoming tides and see family groups coming upstream to perform their last living acts to create the next generation. Dark shapes in merky water, carrying the eggs of tomorrow’s fish.

This is a tidal area, connected to the bay and salt water a half-mile downstream, and so these mud flats appear, then disappear, every six hours as the water leaves and then returns. Herons cruise the shorelines and belted kingfishers fight for their bit of watery turf – yak, yak, yak, yak. Otters are here, along with bobcats, bear and cougar, racoons and eagles. It’s a busy place. And yet, up on the high banks on both sides, people live in houses, chickens and lawnmowers can be heard in backyards, kids go to school and dogs bark – all completely unconnected to this vibrant community right below them. It’s almost as if there are two parallel universes here, with few interactions between them. It’s only when a bear competes with a berry picker, or the cougar forgets and walks down the street in plain view of picture windows are there any interactions between wild and unwild. “DO something about the bear in my berry patch” the woman wrote in Letters to the Editor.” “Like what”, I wondered, “make his share his berries?”

Low Tide is an ORIGINAL painting is another watercolor and ink on Arches paper, 10″ x 14″ and $239 unframed.
A dark mahogany double-matted frame makes it a total of $279 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. I can email you a photo of it framed, but we didn’t want to junk up this post with it. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was posted to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

Uncategorized

Point Wilson – Spring Driftpile redo

(It appears my server decided to only send this out to just a few on the mailing list, so we’re doing it again. I apologize if you got this twice.)

I’ve always enjoyed the vibrancy of watercolor and India ink. It was a style I learned early-on as a kid, and I’ve never tired of it. On our recent little “drive around the block”, I tried doing some of these in the car while underway, and it wasn’t easy. No, I didn’t draw and drive (as a friend said).

And so, I thought I’d continue here in my studio and on location. A bit more steady of hand, I’d say. The fun part for me is that I splash the paint on with very few indicators or sketch marks. It looks positively awful at that stage, but the ink layer brings it all together, and the image appears almost by itself. The pen I use is a green Cross, originally made decades ago when I bought it new. The first gold point it had I wore down to a nub, so that the lines looked like a felt pen. Oh, and it leaked all over the place, forcing me to keep a towl always at the ready. I dearly loved that tool, and was more than happy when I found out that Cross gladly rebuilds old pens – and for no charge. Now, it’s going strong with a major rebuild. Feels like an old friend.

This ORIGINAL watercolor and ink painting is on Arches paper, 10″ x 14″ and $240 unframed.
A double-mat and mahogany frame makes it a total of $279 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to see this post on the blog page, along with all the other posts.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography. There’s some great new flower images from  her garden.

Uncategorized

End of the Road – A Fantastic Trip

Just one more episode of the Road Trip.We’re in Ellensburg, WA for the night, camped along the Yakama River. 150 miles to go. So, it’ll be something like 7800 miles in a bit less than a month. We went through 21 states and a couple more than once. We counted at least 12 different cultural areas that could almost be called different countries. Some of them were so culturally different we had great difficultly understanding anyone, even though it was English (or something like it). And, as Nancy said, it was a real adventure.

We’ve received several emails about what we’re using. It’s a Scamp trailer and a 4runner. The 4runner gives us good fuel economy, reliability and off-road use in a mid-sized bombproof car. The Scamp is our second. It’s only 16 feet, yet it has a kitchen, enclosed shower and potty, mid-sized fridge, microwave and stove. It has propane and electric heaters, air conditioning and, unlike the VW camper we had, it’s sealed up so outside noise stays outside. We’ve been averaging between 15 and 18 mpg, depending on headwinds or if the air is on. There’s a reason this is our second set of these vehicles. We simply can’t find a better combination that fits our needs of camping in strange out-of-the-way places, smallness and high-quality vehicles that hold together.

This trip gave us a new-found love for our crazy country. Everyone seems pretty together. There’s better food, better conversations and more friendly people than we’ve seen for decades of travel. In essence, I think our country is growing up. We never had a bad moment with anyone, including the con artist that took our $20 (the entertainment was worth twice that). The only real negative: this country is full over very, very large people, and it’s going to kill millions of us if we don’t get it together and demand better food. We ARE seeing better food in WalMart and McDonald’s (of all places), but most of the mom and pop stores and restaurants aren’t even trying. They’re still serving the same crap that killed our parents.

Best quote of the trip from Nancy: “Larry, it’s on your leg. I don’t know what it is, but it’s big, it’s bad and it’s going to bite. (it was an Everglades Horsefly, the size of a small dinner plate that broke part of the fly swatter subduing it.)

Best food: the killer caramelized onion and chapoltly pulled-pork tacos on Magazine Street in New Orleans.

Worst Food: the deep-fried chicken strips in South Dakota, with one of my puzzles mounted and framed on the restaurant wall nearby. How embarrassing is THAT?

Most challenging driving: figuring out an escape plan from the dust storm and interstate pileup north of Tucson, AZ.

Most interesting sign: Prom Dresses.com = HOT, Stylish yet modest – (a billboard in Salt Lake -and I thought Military Intelligence was an oxymoron).

Or the sign in the KOA rest room: Flush twice so you don’t leave your yellow stain behind.

Thanks for reading this stuff. It’s been fun telling you all about it.
Our blog is published at larryeifert.com/wordpress, where it’s in a proper form (but words are still mis-spelled there too).

Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.