On a recent hike in the Olympic Mountains, I decided to turn my paintbrush towards the endemic Olympic Marmot. There are five mammals and nine others (fish and amphibians) that are only found here and nowhere else on the planet. That’s right, only here! So if you see an alpine chipmunk, it’s the Olympic Chipmunk!
The Olympic Marmot is a woodchuck-type critter that lives in burrows just at treeline. They’re worth painting. I also did some watercolors of their world, a rare place with fragile flowers and manicured meadows, streams falling and pocket ponds people would pay big money for at home – but here it’s just why I come in the first place, and the only real cost is sweat. It’s a singular place like no other I know.
But the marmots aren’t the wildlife I want to tell you about. Here’s a little story about one night there, very small tent and a big experience that was, in the end, a great memory. It was just getting dark and . . . .
I zipped my Lunar Solo tent’s fly shut, snuggled into my bag and fell sound asleep. No moon tonight, the night was pitch black except the amazing spectacle of the Milky Way above. Sometime later, I was suddenly awakened by someone, or something, rattling the tent, grunting, heavy breathing. I was in the Olympics, so no grizzlies, but still! It was really shaking.
Then, another set of major rattling and just as I started to yell a warning, down the tent came on top of my head, me in a sort of Lycra cocoon, fumbling both for the zipper and the light. Then more noises outside (wait, I WAS outside – nylon doesn’t count). I realized it was more deerlike than bear, I thought. I got the zipper open, and from my knee viewpoint there I was – looking up at two rather enormous bucks, lots of fuzzy antlers, and one of my hiking sticks in someone’s mouth. Deer slobber, yuck.
The Olympic Mountains of Washington are rare in that there aren’t any mineral deposits, no salts to licks, no seeps, and so all the animals are mineral-starved. The Olympic chipmunk wants your potato chip for the salt, not the food. The deer follow you around hoping you will urinate so they can lick it up, immediately. It’s a little off-putting at first, but then we all just get used to it – and these two were after the salt on my hiking stick’s handles. They weren’t going anywhere until I provided a diversion, so – well, with my light I walked over and found a big flat rock. I’d tell you what it was like to walk across a black meadow with two 200-lb. deer right on my heels, but I’ll let you imagine it.
Back in bed, I listened to both of them licking away, shoving each other, heavy breathing, some grunting. Just try to put that out of your mind and go back to sleep!
Glacier lilies form fields of yellow and white, thousands of them. These glorious flowers seem to prefer the sheltered meadows or under trees. I think they’re easily burned by the sun, so they’ve learned to grow best without the intense alpine sun blasting them.
Later in the hike, top of the pass. I soon turn 75 and feel seriously grateful I can still do this. Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.
There are trails, good, bad and even ugly, and then there are a few that quality as something more than just a trail. This one is just that, something considerably more. It’s not easy to hike, that boardwalk over the swampy stuff is something you have to pay attention to, and it goes on for miles. I’ve been there before, recently returned and realized I enjoyed it so much I just might go back again soon. I think it’s the variety, miles of old-growth Sitka spruce and red-cedar forest, more miles of wilderness beaches, a deep history lots of wildlife – it’s a package deal.
While there I did some art. Maybe that’s even tougher than hiking a split red-cedar boardwalk. Refining the essence of a place into a few quick pencil strokes isn’t the easiest process. It’s not what you draw, or paint, its what you DON’T paint. It’s just so easy to get clogged up, obsessed with all those tiny but glorious details – and there goes another hour, and another.
Here I am, painting the scene I’m sitting in – a selfie.
I hit it just right to see the northern spring migration of many. Terns, plovers, sandpipers, lots of ducks and ragged geese in lines, all coming up from the south at night, then pacing the beaches during the day to replenish energy. This bird, an American Golden Plover, was with his flock and destined for the far Alaskan Arctic to help raise a family. I had never seen this spectacular bird in its spring breeding colors and realized how the mottled golden back might blend into these beaches perfectly, camo for safety against soaring eagles looking for a meal. They were stunning.
If you live on the Olympic Peninsula and hike like I do, you undoubtedly know this place. I’ll not name it here to protect what I can of what I consider the finest, most isolated wilderness stretch of Pacific Coast we have left in the lower 48. This was my camp, and not a single other person was in sight. That monster tree butt just past my Six Moon Lunar tent was meaningful. A tsunami would bring it right on top of me in the middle of the night and at least I wouldn’t have to worry if the zipper worked!
I want to thank Six Moon Designs, the fine ultralight gear company in the Portland area for helping with my equipment, and helping an older guy lighten his load. It makes it so I can continue with this passion, of making art and doing it out in the wilderness. I understand now that, if I’m lucky, I might be able to do this for years to come.
Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.
I freely admit it, I can’t make big mileages hiking if I stop to do these paintings. I’m fast, but not THAT fast, so, I’ve learned to shorten my goals, keep it realistic – and enjoy myself. For this, I get art to take home, my old body thanks me for slowing down, and by taking care I get to come back again and again to do this. And one more perk that is the difference between hiking and making art. I get to actually LOOK at the landscape, see how it’s built and has evolved. I see and understand how the flowers grow beside that dainty little brook where it spills out of the lake. Or how the trail crews have built a little path of rocks hauled over from a scree pile possibly 50 years ago. Putting in mileage sure doesn’t get you this close connection – but making trail art does.
Fleabane-beside-the-creek
These paintings represent places that moved me enough to stop and draw. On this trip, fourth of the season, I didn’t take my paints, but instead just a pencil, long point pencil sharpener and some water color paper. The color was added back in my studio, and I loved reliving the trip in this way. It took less art-making time on the trail, yet provided a ‘second adventure’ for me here at home reliving the same places again. I recommend it, really!
Sunset-trail-toward-the-peak
In this painting, I liked the way the soft light from distant fires softened up the sky, made companion colors in the willows fit perfectly as they yellowed for fall. The fleabane flowers beside the creek were about spent, with only a few yellow and white petals remaining – but it was a beautiful little place with water gurgling by. Willows, their leaves chomped on here and there by the black-tailed deer, were sporting galls and little caterpillar cocoons awaiting first freeze so they could spend their winter safe under snow on the ground. The place looked felt very soft and settled. Both these paintings were created at places where I was also tired of walking, so it was good timing to take time, calm down, make some art.
As I hiked along and came into a big meadow, the vertical peaks of the Olympics really contrasted my view. Flat and stable, then vertical and jagged, rising fast and steep. That’s what these Olympic Mountains are, really steep. The Dungeness River starts up here and drops 7600 feet in only 28 miles to the Pacific Ocean, one of the steepest watersheds in the country. Ah, but those first dozen miles at the top, they’re just pure magic. One of the side secondary rivers begins here in this valley, surrounded by snowy peaks and a chain of lakes. Not a single lowland trail comes here, they’re all high subalpine or high-elevation trails that drop down into this magic place, giving it a Shangri-La feeling bounded by barriers on all sides.
Mountain-Gentian
Gentian : gen shenGentians are fall-blooming plants of subalpine wet meadows. They’re one of my favorite flowers because they start blooming as summer is fading, being downright gutsy about their timing. They grow in clusters from a solitary root, and are at first tightly zipped up, a dark midnight blue that is truly rare in color. I don’t know another alpine flower with this amazingly vibrant blue. As they open, the insides begin to show lighter shades of cobalt, and again this is color not often seen in the wild, anywhere. They’re spectacular, to say the least I can about a plant that’s learned to flower just before first frost. What timing!
Orange Mountain-dandelion
On the other side of the color spectrum, a nose-up look at these plants that were upslope and out in the open from the gentians showed an orange mixed with white, just a tad of white to tone it down. And a little bee getting a meal. This was an upclose and personal painting – the flowers are only two inches wide, max. Orange mountain-dandelion has a hyphen, meaning it’s not a real dandelion, but one that looks similar to it’s backyard relatives. I found these in a much drier place than the gentian but still beside the trail. Both give great color to a drying meadow in late August.
My Six Moon Designs Lunar Duo was a bit too spacious for just me, but I luxuriously lounged in it, spread my stuff all over the place like I lived there. I guess I did. It’s an amazingly big tent for its 45 ounces of weight. This tent, and the other ultralight gear is what’s getting me into these places these days, and allowing me to do it in comfort.
At this campsite, an outcropping of boulders provided some really good reflections in the little lake, and so a painting was needed. Oh, I could have just turned the paper upside down and drawn it a second time, but that’s cheating, and not very accurate. Beside me while I drew, this Olympic chipmunk joined me. The Olympic Peninsula has several endemic mammals that live only here. This is one, and possibly my favorite. It’s small, even looks small with its short nose. This moment, with the chippy and me, my pencil and paper, are what makes my hiking complete – close connections with nature that will remain in my mind throughout the winter.
Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.
In the 1970’s, I hiked into Caribou Lakes Basin in Northern California’s Trinity Alps. It’s a place of great beauty, stark white Sierra granite and rare plants that mix Pacific Coastal and Cascade ecosystems together in a jumbled profusion – the most conifer species together in one place in North America. That evening, I camped near another hiker, an older gentleman who was comfortably stretched out on a flat shelf of granite above the lake. (I was about 28 years old and everyone with white hair looked old to me.) It was a bit of a shock to realize he was without a tent or stove – or even a sleeping bag. I remember actually being a little worried about him, then realized he was traveling as light as one could in those days. He knew exactly what he was doing, much more than I did. After more consideration, I realized he wouldn’t have been there in the first place had he been carrying the normal 40+ lbs. we all struggled with in those days. A big smile was on his face, I remember that, and he looked to have less than half of 40 lbs. spread around him. No wonder he was smiling!
His main equipment seemed to be just a big tarp, and after his cold dinner he simple rolled everything, including himself, inside the tarp and spent the night poking his head out to star-watch, decades before Dark Skies became a ‘thing’ in Parks. I remember thinking he was like a big burrito, rolled in that tarp, and wondered if the bears liked Mexican. The next day, he told me he was in his 70’s and was determined not to stop hiking, experiencing pristine and untrammeled nature and that it kept him healthy.
Today, I am that guy!
Larry Eifert 74th Birthday
The Addition of Art
Very early on I learned to carry paper and pencil, watercolors and brushes into the wild. Little paintings that became the result piled up at home – so I started selling them, and all these years later I can say I’ve actually made a good living painting nature. It takes thousands of paintings to become an artist, and, well, that’s just what I did, one little effort at a time. The ah-hah moment came in the 80’s when I realized I could make art in national parks, and park staff might find a place for them actually in the park.
Early morning pond ice at 6000 feet in August, Olympic National Park.
As the decades passed, the outdoor gear companies caught up with me, and my tent, bag, stove and all the rest now weighs about as much as the older gent’s tarp – yes, the tent, bag, pack and all the rest weigh in at about 25 lbs, including the painting materials. What that means is that besides me, many more women and older hikers are out there now, and with some physical luck, I’ll bet you I can continue to do this into my 80’s. These days I don’t go as far, or as high, but still I get to meaningful and stunningly-wild places all the same.
Six Moon Designs Lunar Solo, my 2-pound tent in action.
So why go to all this trouble with the art-thing? Why go to wild country and take paper and pencil, maybe some paints. Wouldn’t it be easier just to pull out my phone and take pictures like everyone else? See it, point and tap. My short answer is, yes, of course it’s easier to take a photo. I do this too. But this art-thing is vastly beyond the level of hastily recording your journey. It’s not just about holding up a plastic box in front of you, shielding your eyes from what you might actually be seeing and looking into a little TV. It’s about YOU actually seeing what you’re looking at and seeing it better. A lot better!
When I make a little sketch, it takes some studying.
You don’t just bang it out and run down the trail, and that’s why most of these are either early morning or late afternoon paintings made around camp. Those contemplative times mean I can stand there and ask myself just how does that mountain ridgeline go? How are the trees in front of it highlighting certain areas of the mountains behind them? What about the foreground where there’s a little path, maybe that might be moved over a bit to make a better composition. In fact, maybe I can move the mountains a bit left to highlight some details I like. Oh, you sure can’t do THAT with your phone camera, can you? It’s a clear day, totally blue skies? Maybe I could add some clouds to make it more complex and interesting, just a few flicks of the pencil and I have mountains tearing at passing clouds, making movement and drama. You see, it’s not just about making art from what you see, it’s about designing nature to look even better than it is – and these places are fairly wonderful already.
Meadows Camp
I usually start these little paintings by just taking a moment – and looking, really looking at what I got all enthrawled with in the first place. What did I think might make it a nice piece of art? I try not to design the entire thing in my mind, just get a sense of what’s out there. Maybe it’s some fish swimming below me in a clear pool, a bird going about it’s business, the way two ridgelines come together. The painting above shows some of this, the way the two mountains lean inwards toward the picture’s center. Then the trail angles away and upwards towards the same spot. It’s a way to bring the wondering eyeballs towards the tent, the center-of-interest where you want viewers to end up. I wanted them to imagine that THEY, the viewers are walking up the trail towards camp.
American Dipper
American Dippers are one of my favorite creatures to paint. These little gray birds make their lives along only the clearest and coldest mountains streams, and even nest behind waterfalls where the little growing family is constantly wet, or very nearly so. Given a sharp elbow bend in the stream, they will always fly over water the long way instead of short-cutting it through forest. But here’s the best part. They make their living by walking and flying underwater, looking for insects, small fish and caddisfly larva. For me, an artist-naturalist, they hold fascination because of their homes, maybe more than the bird itself. In this painting, I carefully left the area behind the dipper so the dull-gray bird would stand out better on it’s perch rock. In reality, a second after I drew it, the bird jumped into the pool and vanished as it made it’s way in search of dinner. Yes, they dip up and down when rock-sitting.
Royal Creek – Glacier Flour Blue
That evening, I watched the colors of the setting sun high overhead and beyond the mountains. I had lost the sun an hour earlier down in this canyon, but had already picked out a ‘sitting rock’ for morning coffee, a Starbucks instant backpackers seem to prefer – me too. As I looked at the sky overhead, I noticed the silhouetted trees arched over the top of me. Of course, in reality they were actually straight vertical, but I made this painting look like they were arched over me, closing me in like a shelter. For clarity and design, I left out about half of them and focused on just two for details. Did I get the point across?
Looking Up – It’s a Glorious Sunset
I should probably mention here that this year Six Moon Designs sponsor me by passing over some of their gear to try. I feel good that, at 74, I have such a company willing to help me continue my life of hiking, making it easier to get to these places. The painting below is their Lunar Solo, a beautiful little single-hiker tent that’s making these trips a joy. That’s a single pole holding it up. The entrance side can be opened wide for an 8-foot view, sort of like a picture window. I love to sit inside with both sides opened up. This evening I sat there and watched the sun set as I drew this painting almost to completion, adding my water jug, stove and coffee mug in the foreground to give it scale and a connection to me. Those things were placed there at the end once I sketched the rest of it. In front, the huge meadow allowed me to watch wildlife appear at the end of a hot day, but by the time the deer showed up, the painting was finished. Does it feel like you’re there ready to crawl into your sleeping bag? I hope so.
Sunset inside the tent
I truly believe that making simple expressions on paper can enhance a hike anywhere, and give you something solid to remember it with.
Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.
Making art on the trail – it’s my way of taking home some souvenirs. The very act of making art means I have to slow down, stop forward motion and actually see nature around me. I often pass hikers so intent on the trail coming up before them they don’t even see me standing beside there, watching them and wondering if they’ll even notice me. Some don’t! I suspect it’s the same for the deer and bears they pass too. I imagine them saying “many people come here looking, but there are so few actually seeing”.
I’m an older hiker now in my mid-70’s, but I’m still passionate about continuing this odd sort of primitive act of strapping a bag on my back and walking up a mountain. I’ve done it for a very long time now, and I never feel so close to life as I do out when I’m out there. It seems important, and I want to continue to do this as long as I’m able. So, some changes had to be made a few years ago – lighter equipment, a lighter me, a healthier lifestyle, regular exercise and being more careful how I walk. I’m now much more aware of being safe, and I’m facing the fact that just one stupid stumble and it might be the last step of trail I ever do. So I’ve slowed my pace, shorten goals and buy new boots more often. This means there are some new perks, like going slow enough to inspect how nature works, see the vibrancy of nature and how it goes on in the wild without us messing with it.
My paint kit, paints, paper, pencil and sharpener weighs in at about 12 ounces.
This is a cheap way to have fun.
Slowing down means I can make art while I’m out there, although I’ve always done this in some form – even when I was running down the trails. There are lots of ways to do this, and I fool around with several processes. One is to draw out the sketches while on the trail, refine them at home and add color there. That way I don’t have to carry the paints and mess with water or the sun, and it takes less time. Other trips I take the entire kit of paints, pencil, paper and sharpener and a brush, sit down in a meadow in the morning or evening after hiking, and paint with it all on my lap. This way I can match the colors I see instead of translating information from memory or photos later at home – or just making it up. It’s a more authentic painting, I think, to do it all on the spot.
Equipment: I really like, am almost passionate about, Noir black wood HB#2 pencils from Ticonderoga, and I carry a tiny little pencil sharpener called a “Long Point”. This little thing keeps the pencil sharper far longer than normal sharpeners, important when I’m in the flow of seeing and drawing.
While there are far better papers, the 5.5″ x 8.5″ 400 Series Strathmore Watercolor blocks ($5 for 12 sheets) are cheap, hold up well with scrubbing out goofs and provide a way to store finished paintings on the trail. Keep the paper small and paintings go quicker. Prang double set of watercolors ($11.50) provide a closed kit for hiking and yet opens to a nice set of paints opposite lots of mixing trays. It comes with a nice brush, big enough for wash work, small enough for details – and it stores in the pallet.
You don’t need more. For under $20, the entire painting kit weighs about 12 ounces and can be tucked into my pack, just waiting, tantalizing me, offering to make my hike a far better memory. It’s saying, “take me out, open me up”. Want proof, you’re reading this, aren’t you?
This is how I work
On a lunch break, I was standing beside a back eddy on Heather Creek. The stream was high and quick, running fast with a warm day’s runoff from the melting snows upslope. Suddenly, I noticed a flash in the water, then movement, then more. Half a dozen brook trout were holding in the back eddy, facing downstream. Occasionally, a fish would break rank, dart out into the opposite-flowing current and snatch up an insect floating by.
These fish were perfectly color matched with their rocky surroundings, and the slight reddish pectoral fin was all that gave them away. That fin, just behind the eye, the one that often lays flat so it shows from above was what told me which trout species I was seeing. That slight bit of warm red was only occasionally visible, or I’d have missed seeing them altogether. So, now here’s the best part of this experience. I did this piece of art standing right in front of them, and now, as I write this, I realized those fish are most likely still there, still going about their business in that bit of stream. I may be gone from there, but this bit of nature is probably not. I have a good memory, but it will always maintained by this painting of them. This gives me great satisfaction, some small token of this trip that I can conger up later to remember what I thought was a superior moment.
I was waiting for dinner
Like many solo hikers, I use a JetBoil stove that gives me a liter of boiling water in 100 seconds. It’s light, stores all its parts inside the pot, and I can have morning Starbucks coffee in one minute flat. Think of that! I started camping in a time when a wood fire was all I had, all anyone had to get a hot cup of coffee or a warm meal. It was a true ordeal, scratching up raw dirt for a fire pit so I wouldn’t burn the place down, scrounging around under bigger trees for small dry twigs and then bigger branches, finding dry duff for tinder – then hoping the darned thing actually started. I still makes fires occasionally, but the urgency in the past is past. Instead, I can paint a little picture of what I saw, the kitchen – or the open meadows before me, clouds breaking off the peaks above Royal Basin to the west. I used the two ancient Douglas-firs snags for the center of interest and two matching little firs just starting life for the foreground.
It may not seem apparent from these little watercolor paintings, but I’m really not that abstract all the time. I paint bigger stuff, I mean BIGGER stuff, often for the National Park Service for parks around the country.
I recently used my knowledge of the Olympic Mountains to paint 500 sq feet of murals for the Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Center, and the process wasn’t really much different than hiking up a trail and learning what the place looks like. Yes, it’s the same guy doing both the trail paintings and these huge wall paintings. Me.
Also for Olympic National Park, I’ve painted several large wall murals of the Elwha Dam deconstruction, the largest dam removal in US history. The murals showed how the river would look after nature heals and was used for community outreach in libraries, visitor centers and schools. These were painted using day hikes to gain references, and again it was the process of studying nature and then just putting it down on a huge canvas. To tell you the truth, while I like doing these big paintings – standing by a river and drawing fish in the back country is much more fun.
Elwha River Estuary Olympic National Park
Finally, about the Tent
You can see my sketch pad in the foreground, in front of my camp, the tent set up for the evening. This is my routine, set it up, make water for the night with my filter down by the creek or lake, then settle in and make some art while there’s still light. Because I’m not carrying 40+ lbs any more, I can paint instead of licking my wounds. I feel good, and this tent is helping. It’s a Six Moon Designs Lunar Solo from a small company in the Portland, Oregon area. They sent me this to use, and my packed tent weight went from 6 lbs to 1 lb 10 ounces. It’s an amazing shelter, I think, that uses my single hiking stick as the pole. No tent poles means an even lighter tent.
This brings me back to how I started this story, about older people getting out, experiencing nature and bringing back memories. It’s a subtle hint that, if you like what I’m writing about here, you can do this too. Get some cheap or used gear to start, do some short hikes, sleep under the stars and find some real happiness in these strange times.
Go to the mountains, it will heal your soul.
Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com, down the right side of the home page.
“Getting out there”, the mentally and physically healing immersion into wild nature is nothing new. Okay, I understand what it does for the soul, not to mention an aging body, but it cannot be understated. We’ve gotten to know the some quickie lowland Olympic hikes and this post is about an easy early-summer trail. A couple of years ago I painted this acrylic of the river beside that trail, its namesake. It shows the river crashing along during the early spring snowmelt. The photo below was taken close to the same place, a month and some years later, shot just a two days ago.
Some hikers passed us, going at a jog, all careful of the fact we were socially distancing. Everyone was passing like they should, like they were smart. All had snowshoes, gear for alpine efforts – that told me they were probably returning from Mt Constance a few miles west and vastly up. Decades ago, I, too, would have been running down the trail and aiming for a hamburger. Now? Not so much in a hurry. For our part, it’s not the act of getting there and back, although we did that, but rather appreciating nature on every step. We were already there, after all, every step of the way. Smelling for forest, feeling the rising humidity from the river, closely looking at details, hearing and feeling our surroundings is now what it’s all about.
In my later years, I’ve come to truly worship those details, the way a branch has become intertwined with moss, a columbine flower presenting itself to a pollinator. Taking an extra few minutes for some field sketching makes me intently focus even sharper, to see the mountain rising up ahead, how the glaciers carved this valley and where the trees seem to grow best – or the fire scars on hillsides where ancient burns came down the valley.
Nancy photographing some trail-side columbine.
On a sunny south-facing slope, I spotted some California hazel, a soft-leaved shrub I remember from my years of trails in the Trinity Alps and High Sierra. Hazel and cascara, another southern shrub were both here, remnants of warmer climates now past. It takes a lifetime of doing this stuff to quickly grasp these details, and it’s what I tend to focus on these days, the details. I’m not a botanist, I didn’t even take biology in school (how’d THAT happen?), but I love these mountains, any mountains, and want to understand how they work, who the characters are, why they’re here.
The physical world is still in charge, no matter what we think! I lost a good friend this past week, Ron Mastrogiuseppe, a former scientist and naturalist for the National Park Service. Ron was the first naturalist for Redwood National Park and over the years he taught me an appreciation for nature you don’t find in books. Sure, books are important to get you the basics, but in field observation you get the actually interaction of an ecosystem, right before your eyes. Ron was considered to be somewhat eccentric, but I’d call it more a heightened level of observation and deep believe in science. He is listed as discoverer of a tree species in the Sierra, along with his wife, Joy. Ron also found proof of the date Mount Mazama erupted, when Crater Lake was formed and reset our known history of that amazing lake. One doesn’t do that just reading books or watching TV, but actually going there in person. Ron founded Crater Lake Institute and commissioned many pieces of art from me. He helped me appreciate the details, and maybe more importantly, how the details really matter.
Science, it drives passion and love for things far beyond just walking past a shrub or two. Once I understood that, I was changed forever.
Upstream on the Dose – with the Olympics just beginning.
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