A cold day for early August in the Cascades! Cloudy, windy, threatening rain all day. But dramatic, yes! Broken Top, the dead volcano, seemed almost to be coming back to life, with clouds rising out of its shattered core.

Waking in the pre-dawn dark after a night of sleeping on Mary’s Peak, the highest mountain in the Coast Range, I followed a trail to a clearing, where I set up my tripod, attached the camera to it, then sat down and waited for the scene to reveal itself. The mountain on the horizon is Mt. Jefferson. The Willamette River, though you can’t see it in the photo, runs right to left through the middle distance, to meet the Columbia at Portland. The silvery clouds come from the Pacific. Perfect silence, except for the little voice in my head saying, “I want coffee. A latte. With big heaps of foam….”

And then the sky turned marmalade.

Click.

“The true harvest of my life is intangible — a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched.”

–Henry David Thoreau