Category Archives: Hiking

Backpacking, featured, Hiking, Nancy Cherry Eifert

2026-3 New Paintings from Larry Eifert

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 I originally made the right side dense with ferns and salal, a rhododendron – but changed it to a more simple scene to focus on the trail. 6″x6″ canvas, it’s available here: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.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here is my Etsy site with my currently available paintings for easy sale.

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

Click here to go to our main website.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Or Crater Lake Institute’s website which I also build – viewership of several million a month!

Backpacking, Hiking, Interpretive Art, National Park Service, Nature Art, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

Green Rock – oil on canvas

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.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/EifertGallery

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here is my Etsy site with my currently available paintings for easy sale.

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

Click here to go to our main website.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Or Crater Lake Institute’s website which I also build – viewership of several million a month!

Backpacking, Hiking, National Park Service, Nature Art, New Painting Post, Wildlife

Royal Lake – Olympic National Park – oil on canvas

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.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/EifertGallery

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here is my Etsy site with my currently available paintings for easy sale.

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

Click here to go to our main website.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Or Crater Lake Institute’s website which I also build – viewership of several million a month!

Hiking, Interpretive Art, National Park Service, Nature Art, New Painting Post, Wildlife

Dipper Flying Home – a new painting

American Dipper Flying Home is an original oil painting – not even varnished yet. It tells the story of a little flying dipper flying into a big waterfall, high in the Olympic Mountains of Washington.

This is an 18″ x 24″ oil on canvas, and it is now available. The frame in the photo comes with it but we have other choices – I just really like how the frame colors fit with this painting. Outside measurements are about 24″ x 30″. We can ship this at cost, double-boxed and ready to hang. Email me at larryeifert@gmail.com if you’re interested in more information. The framed price is $1300.

For those who don’t know about these interesting little birds – dippers, here’s a short essay about them. Also known as Water Ousels (East Coast), they make their living completely dependent on cold, clear mountain streams. They lives are entirely connected to these streams and they don’t migrate – even in winter. They even nest behind waterfalls in mossy wet pockets they build.

Dippers were John Muir’s favorite bird, and maybe mine, too. (their name is because they tend to bob up and down as they stand on rocks) The young birds are wet from birth from the constant cold spray of snowmelt water. The parents teach them the routine by diving in, then ‘walking’ underwater, kicking over stones searching for insects and larva. They use their wings outstretched to hold them down in the current. Dippers never leave their streams, and if a tight river bend means a brief flying detour over land, they, instead, fly the long way around the curve to stay connected to their water-home. It’s the very definition of wilderness I’ve always been drawn to and love to paint.

Below is my photo of Royal Falls, one of the sources of the Dungeness River and a major reference for this painting. Royal Falls is high in Olympic National Park, but only about 25 air-miles from where I write this in my studio. The Dungeness is one of the steepest watersheds in the country, dropping over 7000 feet in just 28 miles.

A dipping American Dipper at Tunnel Creek, Olympic National Forest.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Hiking, Nature Art, New Painting Post

Little Oils – Late Afternoon, Grassy Trail

There’s a brief time during a hiking day (imagined) when the sun is almost down, the atmosphere seems overly warm and sort of glowing. I envision going down a trail and seeing a big meadow ahead. Anticipation of something that might be really meaningful.

This is an 11″ x 14″ oil on stretched canvas. The gold frame as you see it makes the outside measurements about 14″ x 17″. It’s currently available from me for $275, frame included – Yup, no gallery upcharges. Shipping would be a bit more, depending on your distance from me. If you’re interested, please email me: larryeifert@gmail.com. Please see the little essay at the bottom.

I love that experience of the good experience about to happen and have tried to get that feeling here – and in almost all my ‘trail’ paintings in the past. These mostly come to me in winter, when I can’t go actually get here, can’t enjoy it as I would in the warmer days of summer.

When I paint these landscapes, especially ‘trail’ stories, I get lost in making them – it’s like I actually really am hiking along in a real place.

Below is a corner of our studio I’ve been using for these current batch of oil paintings. French easel, glass palette, maul stick – and a great view of the forest beyond. See that little ledge below the gold frame, the one with the Atworth logo on it? About every third brush stroke whacks that right end of it on the way back down to the palette for more paint. It gets more paint than the canvas.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here is my Etsy site with my currently available paintings for easy sale.

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

Click here to go to our main website.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Or Crater Lake Institute’s website which I also build – viewership of several million a month!

Hiking, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Wildlife

North Fork Nooksack River – a new painting

This painting is 16″ x 20″ acrylic on canvas, and is available. Email me if you’re interested at larryeifert@gmail.com.  It’s also available with the nice Taos school inspired frame (like you see here) and I already have a shipping crate ready to go. The offering price framed as you see it here is $950 – shipping cost is extra but it will go double boxed UPS.

The Nooksack River, just south of the Canadian border in Washington State. It’s one of our favorite Northwest rivers because it drains water from two of the greatest Pacific Northwest peaks, Mt Baker and Mount Shucksan. North Cascades National Park: big mountains, big glacial power, and the river valley shows that with miles of beautifully sculptured river rock. I’ve painted this area before, but pulled this painting together after I found an unfinished canvas just waiting for me. For some reason, I started this then it just sat there. I especially liked the way the foreground goes blue at the bottom, showing the sky overhead, the water tinted with glacier flour that always makes these river more aquamarine than cobalt.

Someone already asked me about the ducks in the painting, a pair of common mergansers, male has the green head. In the Northwest, these guys spend winters out in salt water. Then in spring, mated pairs head back up rivers to nest in tree cavities beside their grocery stores – the rivers. Their routine is to float leisurely downstream from pool to pool, diving for fish, sometimes resting on a rock in midstream. Then they fly back upstream and start the routine all over again.

This, believe it or not, this was my model for the painting. I like to take an idea and just make it up into a painting that’s far beyond what I originally saw. Let’s see, bigger rocks, add the birds, make the thing glow with Hudson River School late afternoon light.

Again: This painting is 16″ x 20″ acrylic on canvas, and is available. Email me if you’re interested at larryeifert@gmail.com.  It’s also available with the nice Taos school inspired frame and I already have a shipping crate ready to go. The offering price framed as you see it here is $950 – shipping cost is extra but it will go double boxed UPS.

Thanks for reading this week.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Hiking, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Wildlife

North Fork Sol Duc River – a new painting

This painting is 16″ x 20″ acrylic on canvas, and is available. Email me if you’re interested at larryeifert@gmail.com.  It’s available with the nice Taos school inspired frame and I already have a shipping crate ready to go. Shipping would be extra but we usually ship UPS so it won’t be much.

This painting was inspired by a day hike up the North Fork of the Sol Duc River in nearby Olympic National Park. Not many hikers get here, as it requires a breathe-taking thigh-deep river crossing, but it’s worth every icy step. Once on the east side of the river, the trail goes for miles along the banks, from pool to pool and finally turns into a vague rambling through streamside brush. In places there are sandstone-scoured potholes, meadows beneath huge big-leaf maple groves, just a glorious Olympic ramble. This place has produced several paintings from me, all similar, all emotional light studies of this pristine river’s journey from alpine down into the main stem of the Sol Duc.

Where does this trail start and end? On Olympic National Park’s Sol Duc River Road there’s a parking area just a quarter mile upstream from Salmon Cascades. The trail heads upslope on the east side of the road, the drops to the North Fork in half a mile past the ford. It’s about eight miles upslope to an old CCC shelter, then a few more miles to Mount Appleton and Blue Lake. While the main Sol Duc trail system is mobbed in summer, almost no one makes it this pristine place, just a raven’s flight of a couple of minutes.

This painting is 16″ x 20″ acrylic on canvas, and is available. Email me if you’re interested at larryeifert@gmail.com.  It’s also available with the nice Taos school inspired frame (like you see here) and I already have a shipping crate ready to go. The offering price framed as you see it here is $950 – shipping cost is extra but it will go double boxed UPS.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Hiking, New Painting Post, New Published Story, Published painting, Washington State Parks

Feather Boa – 48 North magazine


With this August 2021 edition, I’ve now done about 110 of these pages, and while I’ve been considering possibly NOT doing any more, I mean, how long can this go on? But I’ve just learned so very much about the Salish Sea by making these pieces of art, researching the details, that I really can’t stop. I see now that you can never learn too much about this stuff, especially in the middle of my seventh decade.  It’s all the fine details about how these things live, how amazing it all is. And besides, it’s really fun to spot something interesting and rush home to write about it – paint it.

Here’s the original drawing, which I did some of while walking Port Townsend’s North Beach at low tide. A VERY low tide, possibly the lowest of the year. All this feather boa kelp was strewn about on the sand, making great abstract forms and shapes.

So, I wrote this in the 2021 August issue of 48 North.

Saw this feather boa on a low-tide beach walk. There was a sandy beach, solid boulders, a place where currents flow –  and all that equals kelp. There are at least 140 types of brown seaweeds here in the Northwest and they all work in similar ways. The permanent base attaches itself to solid underwater rocks. These are usually on underwater reefs and onshore rocks down to about 50 feet deep. If you see kelp floating up ahead of you, there can only be one reason it’s there – ROCKS!

By summer, this plant joins the other kelps in creating real forests of lush green and brown plants waving in the current. While bull kelp stipes (the trunk) and blades (the leaves) can grow 100 feet a season, the feather boa gets to be about 30 feet long, and in my mind it’s the most beautiful of them all. Based on a single velvet-looking stipe about an inch wide, several different types of blades branch off in wild profusion. There are gas-filled bladders that hold the plant up towards the light like little life jackets, single leaves that look like tiny willow leaves, and skinnier lateral branches that look like twigs with smaller blades at each end. The entire thing is shimmery golden brown.

These plants are key habitat to almost countless other creatures and food for many crabs and snails, sea slugs and fish. When you spot feather boas on the beach at low tide, carefully turn over the blades and see what surprises await you. It’s possibly the best reason to come here.

To end, there are lots of parts in this thing. There’s the ‘main stem’ that looks like velcro. Then along the edges are bladders filled with gas so it floats up into the current. The leaves in between provide the photosynthesis to make it live that are all sorts of shapes and sizes, very random. All this on something possibly 20 feet long, and it all grows from a root clinging to an exposed rock, each and every summer!

Larry Eifert paints and sails the Pacific Northwest from Port Townsend. His large-scale murals can be seen in many national parks across America, and at larryeifert.com.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

[previous title] — [next title]

Backpacking, Hiking, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Wildlife

Back to the Beach

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.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Backpacking, Backpacking, Hiking, New Painting Post

Boardwalk and Parkplace

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.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.