Colorful Fall Drive

Its fall time!!!.

Fall or Autumn is one of the four seasons and it is when the summer ends and the winter starts. It is the time when every leaf is a flower. The green leaves turn their color to yellow, orange, red and finally shred into the ground. At the end of the season the trees look bare without a single leaf on it. During fall, nature looks more colorful and beautiful. The trees that lost their leaves in the winter begin to grow leaves again in the spring time. 

This is my second fall in U.S and I have been lured both the times by the beauty of the nature. The cool weather and colorful landscape will definitely cool your mind as well. Then why not go for a fall drive and enjoy the season?!!!.

There are many scenic fall drives in Washington and three among them that we visited are Chinook Pass, White Pass and drive to Leavenworth.

The Chinook Pass provides east entrance to Mount Rainier National Park and is located on SR 410 between the towns of Emunclaw and Naches. We started around 9 am and took the first stop at Skookum falls viewpoint. The weather was windy and very cold. 

Skookum Fall Viewpoint

It was very beautiful drive and we stopped at some points to capture the splendid view of the mountain ranges. 

Chinook Pass

The most beautiful of all the points was Tipsoo Lake. There is a small trail to walk around the lake and view is wonderful along the trail. 
Tipsoo Lake

The cool and calm weather, the mountains and the lake, the colorful landscape; it was just a perfect weekend spot for relaxing.

Finally we drove through Yakima and reached home around 9 pm.

The White Pass scenic Byway is located on US Highway 12 in central Washington state. We started at 9.30 am and took a break at one of the coffee shop. Then we stared driving towards scenic byway. On the way we stopped at Mayfield Lake Park which provides access to Mayfiled Lake near Mossyrock. The weather was chill and cloudy. The actual fall drive started from this place.
Mayfield Lake

The next stop we took was at Riffe Lake. The sight was beautiful but we could not stay out for longer time because of cold weather. We continued our journey and the drive was spectacular. We stopped at some places on the way to seize the beauty of the nature in our camera. It was around 2 pm and we stopped for lunch. 
Riffe Lake

After lunch we drove towards Packwood. We stopped at Mt. Rainier viewpoint on the way from where we can have a good view of Mt. Rainier. We could see the Rainier but it was partially covered by the clouds.


The blue sky, the mountains and the greenery had already made the drive fantastic and the fall colors added extra glamour to the nature. We drove again to Chinook pass this time and it was more enticing than the first visit because of the fall colors and wild flowers.

Chinook Pass

From Chinook Pass we drove back to home and reached at around 10 pm.

A drive to Leavenworth is also very scenic and enticing. We started at 10 am and drove to Leavenworth via Stevens Pass. The mountains, trees, lake everything around looked dazzling; it seemed like someone just painted the nature with magical colors.
Leavenworth

From Leavenworth we drove towards north entrance of Lake Wenatchee. But there was no access to the lake on this way. If we had taken the South Entrance road probably we would have got the access to the lake and captivated more amazing view. But it was already 6 pm, so we decided to drive back to home.

Fall will be over in a week or two and it will be sad to see the surroundings with bare trees. But the time does not stop; Fall will end and spring starts and new life emerges again.

It seems like the nature is giving us a message no matter what not to lose hope in the life and wait for new beautiful life that lies ahead.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Trip to Crater Lake

Image
Finally we were going to Crater Lake, a dream come true moment for us because we were planning to go to Crater Lake from the beginning of the last year but due to some or the other reasons we could not accomplish it. Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the USA, about 1950 feet deep and perhaps the most pristine on the earth.  It is about 350 miles from our place (Redmond, Washington), so we decided to begin the trip on Friday evening and return by Monday early morning. We had booked the hotel at Roseburg and Reedsport for Friday and Saturday night respectively. We were 7 members together, so we had booked a 7- seater Dodge car. We started our journey at about 6.30 pm. After driving for almost 3 -4 hours we stopped at MacDonald's for tea and had upma (Indian dish) for dinner. As we are not a big fan of pizza and burgers, every time we go out we carry homemade food for lunch and dinner. Next day at 2 am we reached our hotel at Roseburg. Si...
Read more

Hiking the Ape Caves

Image
When we say hiking, the picture that comes to our mind is hiking in the forest, in the mountains or in the hill areas. But what if you are hiking inside a large cave where it is pitch dark that means complete absence of natural light and bunch of surprises awaiting for you as you walk in the trail because you will not be knowing where and how the trail ahead goes. Its somewhat unusual right!. Ape caves in Washington will give us similar kind of experience. Ape cave was formed about 2000 years ago when Mount St. Helens erupted. It is 13,042 ft long and is the third longest lava tube in North America. It is located at Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Washington. We did a little bit of research in the internet to find out how difficult the trek will be. We got to know that there are 2 caves: Upper and lower with lower cave being the easier one and upper cave being the difficult one. It was also mentioned that inside the cave it will be pitch dark and temperature will drop, so we h...
Read more

Crater Lake Travel in Winter

Image
It was Thanksgiving Day.  As Indians we do not celebrate Thanksgiving but yes we were eagerly waiting for this day because we have two days holiday and it is a long weekend!!!. So, we planned to go for a long drive in our three weeks old new car!. The destination we decided was one of the beautiful place -  Crater Lake.  Our plan was to go to Painted hills in Bend on the first day, second day to Crater Lake and finally drive back home via Portland on third day.  Without knowing this plan would turn into one of the most adventurous trip, we started on Thursday early morning all excited!. We crossed freeway I405 South, drove to I90 East, from there took Route 82 and then Route 97 where the road conditions were good. From 97 we had to take the internal road Route 206 where the roads were some what snowy and were not cleaned. The major challenge to drive in these roads is due to the black ice formed on the surface of the roadways. We sw...
Read more