I finished this painting last week – its destination unknown right now. For now, I’m just going to enjoy it in my studio. It’s 48″ x 24″, acrylic on canvas.
On a hike this past fall, I came across this place. It’s not on any trail, and a guy my age probably shouldn’t have been up there, especially hiking solo, but the experience made it all worth it. This is at treeline in Olympic National Park, and these little blue tarns empty into the valley below and join waters to become the famed Gray Wolf River. It then joins the Dungeness River to empty into the ocean at Sequim. It’s one of the highest, shortest and biggest drops of any river in the U.S. The peaks of the Upper Dungeness and Royal Basin – some of the highest mountains in the Olympics, can be seen in the distance, one ridge over. In the distance, I was looking up at Deception Peak at 7788 feet, second tallest mountain in the Olympics (right in the middle of the painting) and Mt Mystery to the right at 7639 feet. They’re just numbers, but to me much more.
These mountains, the closest alpine area to my home in Port Townsend, is all less than 40 air miles away. I know this place well, and have, over the years, made it my source painting models for many paintings. Those valleys in the mist, the rivers, meadows, trails and trees have thrilled me for over half a century.
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I’ve been to this little slice of heaven many times. I didn’t make it this year, so thought I needed to make a painting of it instead. I honestly don’t think I needed any references as I know the place very well. It’s a relatively small subalpine lake, a place few other hikers seem to go to, and maybe that’s why I like it. Often, I’d be all by myself here, camping in the trail crew area where the black-tails also hangout. Only the deer and myself in a place like this. Imagine!
The mountain in the background is Grand Peak, the notch seen just to the right of it Grand Pass, the trail on south to Cameron. It’s not orange rock, that’s my rendition of sunset. The slope on the left is what created Gladys Lake in the first place, glacial rocks plowing up the valley into various ponds. I just love these wet meadows, their meandering little seasonal streams, flower-covered meadows with outcrop rocks where trees have a dry enough foothold to grow. I’d bet that center little island with it’s stunted subalpine firs has been unchanged for centuries.
This painting is oil on canvas, 24″ x 18″ framed or not and is available on by Etsy Eifert Gallery. Email for more details if you want at larryeifert@gmail.com.
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Several new efforts here from the same on-going series of small oils on canvas board. This week I sort of jumped all over the ideas, as you can see, because I’m also onto bigger park projects now. These small paintings are all either 5″x7″ (framed outside is 7″x9″), or 6″x6″ as with the square one. All are currently available on my Etsy Gallery. They’re all $125 framed and freight-free. https://eifertgallery.etsy.com
The top painting is a chestnut-backed chickadee, a local guy I see every day here. I had another project going on that needed a mossy log and found this great example down our driveway. The mushrooms are inky caps, but young enough they weren’t really ‘inky’ yet. Here’s a link if you’re interested. https://eifertgallery.etsy.com/listing/4469193245
This second painting, American dipper, is a little portrait of a gray bird on a gray rock. These little guys are river-specialists, walking underwater to find food, nesting behind waterfalls – and John Muir’s favorite bird. Maybe mine, too. https://eifertgallery.etsy.com/listing/4468115377
This trail is right around the corner from our place in Port Townsend, in a state park with some of the best forest trails I know. I originally made the right side dense with ferns and salal, a rhododendron – but changed it to a more simple scene to focus on the trail. 6″x6″ canvas, it’s available here: https://eifertgallery.etsy.com/listing/4464943181
And finally I was trying to remember a special spot on the Upper Dungeness River, about 25m south of home. I get that way in late winter. I was there last fall when the late afternoon sun was streaming in and lighting up the river with golden afternoon sun. The big glacial erratic rock had me sitting on it, so I reversed the scene as if I were on the far shore. This one is available here. https://eifertgallery.etsy.com/listing/4466197478
Below: A new little bonus portrait of my partner of many decades, Nancy Cherry. It’s acrylic on watercolor paper, and it was painted on a little card for her birthday. Happy Birthday, my partner in life, as well as countless trails and places I’ve painted in a very long and fantastic ride of being an artist.
Nancy Cherry Eifert, March 2, 2026.
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Green Rock is an oil on canvas painting, now available. The canvas is 30″ x 40″ on stretched canvas. It is big enough I thought I’d sell it without the frame, so someone could buy it unstretched, rolled in a tube with the stretcher bars ready to go. We can talk about it.
Below is the painting in a frame, just so you can see what it looks like. I don’t have this frame at the moment, but go ahead and ask.
Where is this place?
The painting is, of course, about salmon (not the green rock). But in these big canvases I find great enjoyment in hiding stuff and telling stories – so how many salmon can YOU find?
I’ve seen many salmon along the Sol Duc River, mostly in Olympic National Park. I even have outdoor exhibit panels there telling the Sol Duc Coho salmon’s story. It’s a special place for both Nancy and me, a place many paintings have been hatched (to use a salmon word). In fact, counting up how many paintings Olympic National Park owns of mine of the Sol Duc Valley: 17! (including one with Nancy in it) Most of them are in a vault at the main visitor center in Port Angeles, so even I can’t see them. All were used for exhibits and reproduced.
If you’d like to find out more about this painting, or if it’s still available, write me at larryeifert@gmail.com.
This is a link to our new Esty store online with some of the available originals.
Royal Lake is an oil on canvas painting, now available. The canvas is 18″ x 24″, with the silver frame as you see it making it approximately 23″ x 29″. It’s now available. I’m offering it with the frame.
Where is this place?
Royal Basin is in the upper Dungeness River Valley, and Royal Lake is exactly 25 air miles from where I write this in my studio – but it will take you a long day to get there. The lake is surrounded by some of the highest peaks in the Olympic Mountains, seven of them and maybe more. I’ve been there to enjoy it many times. What makes this different is that just above the lake the valley broadens out into a plateau where three glaciers once lived. With little cirque lakes, colorful heather meadows and meandering trails – all of it is above treeline. Sit on the rocks above a tarn there and one can hear the Mt Deception glacier towering above you, as it breaks off chunks of ice and rocks, cascading it all into the valley floor below. It’s a place of great beauty. But below, two meadows down, Royal Lake is another, softer world.
This painting is $1300 with the silver frame you see here. It’s not a cheapy, but a quality gallery frame. Shipping is extra but boxing is included. Outside framed measurements are about 23″ x 29″. It was painted with oil on canvas and varnished. If you’re interested, or want it without the frame for a lower price, or just want to communicate, write me at larryeifert@gmail.com
Above is the back of the frame showing the canvas – and a small part of my messy studio. As someone once said “a clean studio is the sign of a unclean mind!” And possibly the reverse might be true as well.
Below: here I am, solo hiking in those same meadows.
This is a link to our new Esty store online with some of the available originals.
This painting is for sale, so drop me a note at larryeifert@gmail.com if you’re interested.Click the image and it should enlarge in your browser.
This is an original acrylic painting on canvas, 30″ x 40″. $3600 framed. A Certificate of Authentication is included. Outside dimensions with the frame is about 36″ x 46″ and it’s not going to be framed in a cheapy frame, but one suitable for galleries. Frame options are available. We have a double-boxed professional box for this to ship with and shipping will be charged at cost.
I like to tell stories in my paintings. This one started that process when I walked out to the end of the local marina’s commercial dock and was greeted by almost 100 chattering little birds, turnstones, resting from days of migration. They fly at night for safety, rest and gossip during the day. But, I also saw them a year before on an April backpack around the Ozette Triangle Trail in Olympic National Park. I saw many sandpipers on the low-tide beach rocks just at dusk – just before they all took off in a whoosh and headed north. Sorting through photos, I ran across these trip photos and found this one, which became the rocks in the painting. It was all I needed to get the project going.
Here’s my little talk about making this painting. It’s on my YouTube Channel along with several others.
My first-draft concept sketch. I put the grid lines in to help redraw it on the canvas.
And I’m currently putting this white-silver frame on it, but we have other styles available.
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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.
Some little paintings of my time there, inside that tent at sunset, and below, low tide watching sea otters herd the kids around the little bay. They’re simple paintings, but make good memories seeing them again here.
I went back to a wilderness beach hike with my little Six Moon Designs tent and my paints. I had plenty of great nature to worship, including an amazing belly-up humpback whale and a Steller’s sealion, both washed up without much injury as far as I could tell. I’m telling you, it is thrilling to walk up to a 30-foot whale on a wilderness beach, a sort of primal experience I will remember for awhile. As I walked up to it, sounds seemed to become sort of diminished, as if I were walking into a quiet room. It was a long way from the water, as you can see in the photo – a minus tide put the waves very far away and the whale seemed oddly out of place.
Then this guy:Exactly above my tent in the top canopy of a Sitka spruce, this bald eagle started in at about 5:30 am, broadcasting its discontent at not seeing breakfast out in the ocean I guess – or, who knows what. Soon the ravens got involved – and it was all over for a sleep-in morning. The Starbucks was made early! Later, I watched this eagle spot a fish at least 300 yards out from where it sat on a treetop, taking a long glide off the branch and catch it! How could it see that far?
I just recently finished three large paintings for Redwood National Park through the Save-the-Redwoods League. In one, I painted the canopy fern mats that develop in ancient trees (not just redwoods) that come from centuries of needle litter building up on branches. These become pockets of leather ferns, huckleberrys and critters. The wandering salamander live generations in those mats, and marbled murrelets, an endangered sea bird, nest on them.
Walking out of the hike to the trailhead, I spotted this one on an ancient Sitka spruce, not far above my head. It had all the components, leather fern, black huckleberry and maybe some salamanders hidden away in the roots. It all seemed to tie together that my work is my play, my hiking is directly tied to my art. It’s just all one. A symbiosis, if you will, of cause and effect. Symbiosis is interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association, typically to the advantage of both. Art and nature, I am who I am, therefore it seems I have to paint and write about it, hopefully to the benefit of nature.
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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.
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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.
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