A few years ago I was at a conference in Seattle.  The conference organizers put together a one-day trip to Mt. Rainier for the day after the conference ended.  My first thought was one of excitement — this would be a wonderful excursion.  That was quickly followed by a number of strong reasons to not do it (added expense, more time away from the family, using up a precious vacation day, etc.).  All too often I have allowed the sense of adventure to get squashed by ruthless pragmatism; this time, I allowed adventure to win, and was greatly rewarded.

 

Armed with only a 2 megapixel digital point-and-shoot, I embarked on a day’s adventure of hiking through the beautiful landscape on the side of this volcano.  There were hours that went by without a verbal thought running through my mind.  I saw and appreciated without trying to interpret.  I was “in the zone” or, as Betty Edwards might say, I was in my “right mind”.  Every so often, my memory card would fill up and I would stop on the side of a trail, transfer the photos to my PowerBook, and then erase the card and continue.  There were wildflowers, but we were about 2 weeks past prime for these.  Everything was so lush and green!  Water was everywhere.  I was in Paradise — quite literally — as there is an historic Paradise lodge where we gathered for a wonderful lunch.  These were early days for digital photography, so I attracted some attention when I whipped out the PowerBook and gave a slide show of the morning’s photos.  After lunch and more hiking and more photographs, we boarded the van and began the descent to Seattle.  I was mostly non-verbal and beat, though more emotionally than physically.  It had been a deeply touching experience, and a reawakening of my right brain.  It would have been easy to just zone out and passively enjoy the drive down the mountain without any further effort.

 

I saw a road sign for “Narada Falls” and reacted suddenly and with little thought.  I asked the driver to pull over.  We were running a little behind schedule, and I think he was already a little irritated with my wanderings during the day.  Nevertheless, he pulled over and we all piled out of the van to see the sights.  I was quite familiar with the Narada music label and thought this might be the place that inspired the name.  The falls were beautiful.  I was kicking myself for not bringing a more serious camera (with a wider-angle lens), but decided to take this equipment limitation as a challenge.  So, rather than try to make the camera’s limited lens as wide as possible, I made it as telephoto as possible, and started photographing parts of the falls rather than the whole thing.  Leaning over a guard rail, and timing it between frequent clouds of mist, I grabbed this shot of where the water lands.  For many reasons, this shot almost didn’t happen and, yet, it was my favorite of the day.

 

By way of epilogue, a few years later I returned to this location.  I wanted to share with my family the beauty that I had seen.  It was nice, but not as nice as the scene shown in this picture.  I often do better at creating a photograph when I return to a place I have visited before, but this experience reinforced for me an important lesson.  Planning to return is nice, but it should not stop me from taking photographs at that time, while I’m there.  Seize the day!