Klamath Marsh is a premier birding spot during migrations but of course we were here the wrong time of year. We did see an adult sora rail with a juvenile working the mudflats near some reeds, but other than a few ducks, hawks and the ever-present great blue herons, there wasn't much going on. I've never seen a great blue heron posing quite like this before.






















Crater Lake is one of those western American icons, a place everyone has seen in travel ads if not in person. We hadn’t visited the park for many years and we had never driven around the entire rim. On previous trips we had done like most other people do, treated the lake as a drive-by: in one end of the park, around part of the rim, and out the other end of the park. In some ways, a trip around the entire lake gets monotonous because there is just one drop dead gorgeous view after another.



























The wildflowers were still blooming at the rim drive’s elevations but it was only on the east side of the lake that the conditions were apparently ideal. I wasn’t able to get any shots of the most spectacular “gardens” since they were invariably no where near where a car could stop, but there were roadside cliffs where a dozen different species of flowers were blooming, then a couple of miles along a different dozen species of flowers crowded the roadside. These are a few of the images I was able to preserve but they only give a tiny sampling of what the drive offered.