It worked.  Nice pictures!

7 - Nurse log gone

6 - Mt. St. Helens

5 - Large Western Red

4 - Leaning Cedar and Old Doug

3 - Cedar, Sitkas and Dougs

2 - Fog

1 - Sunset

Great pics!  But, I can't pick any favorites.  I like them all.  I'd print them out huge & wallpaper my office with them if I could.

John- very nice photos! hard to pick out favorites, but I really like the Mt St Helens aftermath photo, also kind of partial to the Larch pic growing up in Western MT

Thank you for the responses--now I'll make a collage to go with a story that is almost formed and here it is only the 11th of the month.

Indeed, in heart and soul, they are tree huggers.
The lounges are outhouses on Cedar Hollow Trail.
The hole in the tree trunk is about five feet tall. There are remnants of the nurse log a few feet away across the trail.
Our madronas (madrones in California and Texas) are going crazy with early spring weather...some birds already passing through.
The Mt. St. Helens blowdown -- hope to do the loop this summer, no registered runs, but will try to get down that way.
The larch tree picture was taken on the way back from Le Grizz--western Montana indeed. Beautiful country... where you was?
The snow covered trees was from our front deck--three years back?

As a matter fact yes, I used to live in the tiny town of Hungry Horse  It was quite some time ago, I worked as a backcountry ranger for the USFS and my wife worked at Glacier Park.

From somewhere else (reprinted in its entirety with permission from the author)

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I looked at the map again.  In particular I looked at the opposing corners along the northerly tier of the United States.  I used a dollar bill to measure the distance. Seven dollar-bill lengths, almost, from Cape Flattery in Washington State to Quoddy Head State Park in Maine, the location of the picnic table I had the highway map of the U.S. unfolded upon.  Cape Flattery is the most northwesterly point in the contiguous U.S.  Quoddy Head is its northeasterly compatriot.  We were, ignoring spherical distortions and going as the crow goes, approximately 2800 miles east of the point we were familiar with, Cape Flattery, way out on the westerly end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Quoddy Head had been mentioned to us the night before in Acadia National Park.  A campfire conversation about the next day’s travel brought up the idea that we should visit Quoddy Head State Park because of that unique easternmost aspect before turning north, and then, later, west.  The dying embers of the fire and a chilling fog called for the evening’s conversation to end on that point.  We thought the stop at Quoddy Head SP would be an appropriate place for our morning get-out-of-the-car-for-a-few-miles run-jog-shuffle.

The next morning we broke camp, drove east a ways, paused for breakfast, listened to breakfast conversations in what surely was not the same English we used, drove east a ways, paused to look at an osprey’s nest, whose occupants should be giving thoughts to southerly climes soon.  The crisp coolness of the morning air reminded us we were only three days from autumnal equinox.  Three days?  Yes, it was time to quit going east. Almost.

A sign at Quoddy Head State Park’s entrance confirmed our schedule.  The park would close for the season a couple of weeks from now.  The colors of fall were almost gone, especially here on ocean’s edge.  White spruce and balsam fir dominated the land.  Like our Pacific Northwest, there was now more green than any other color.  We parked and, as if one last omen was needed of the lateness of our trip, Kathy took the last brochure from the fog-shrouded information kiosk.  Would no one else need to know about the trails until spring of next year?  Were we the only travelers with a need to get out and let our feet feel the earth for a few miles?  Kathy pointed at the map and said, “The Coastal Trail plus the Bog Trail will give us about five miles.”  I pointed at the fog that had thickened since we parked and dug gloves, knit caps, and sweatshirts out of the pile in the back seat.  We shuffled off down a trail we would likely never see again.

In spring or summer this would be a noisy place, full of chirps and chatter from birds and squirrels.  This morning’s only sound was the dimly heard waves breaking on the cliffs nearby.  We turned onto the Bog Trail and in just a few steps all sound disappeared.  The trail side underbrush, laurel and something that looked like cranberry bushes, the last remnants of grasses and a few pitcher plants, all helped deaden sound.  Several minutes down the trail, we paused to look at the nests made by some unknown birds.  The nests appeared to be made by weaving strands of moss from the nearby trees.  It would be many weeks later, when memory caused me to pick up a book at the library, that I learned that the nests were likely made by parula warblers and that the moss was not moss, but strands of old man’s beard lichen.  The best we could do at the time was decide there were several kinds of lichen in the area.

Like our Pacific Northwest forests, there were many trees that appeared to have been felled by the wind.  The shallow soil and gentle breezes that can become gales were common to both coasts in these northern latitudes.  On this morning the air barely moved.  Only wisps of fog showed the intrusion of a warm air mass onto the cool air of the park.  As with any run that has pauses for looking and learning and our tendency to go down every side trail we came to, we had no idea how far we had run when we got to the bog at Carrying Place Cove—a place the Native Americans portaged their canoes many years ago.  The fog had thickened and it was an easy task to imagine the grunts and groans of their efforts to transfer to the sounds we made as we turned to run back along the coastal trail.

The trail entered an area where geologic origins showed.  Gabbro, a coarse-grained dark rock that started life as magma some millions of years ago, was visible in the walls of the cliffs.  The conifers, stubbornly clinging to cliff’s edge, reminded us of the firs and cedars of Washington that cling to our coastal shores.  Wind bent and weathered, limbs curled as if to ward off a gust of wind yet to come.  The only difference in the two coastal habitats was the size of the trees.  The western trees are much larger.  The coastal currents have some stabilizing effects on the Washington coast.  The cold oceanic waters of this peninsula in Maine provide no basis for a warm growing season.  Many of the trees of coastal Maine are probably the same age as the giant Douglas firs and western red cedars.  The physical size enhanced or diminished by the differing oceanic environs.

Running again, we were climbing the trail just past Gulliver’s Hole—a narrow chasm where a fault in the gabbro was still being shaped by wind and water, and the freezing and thawing of each winter.  We had not seen anyone else in the park and were somewhat surprised when we met two people coming down the trail.  I muttered a brief hello and was surprised at the response, “Spotted Bear!  We camped at Spotted Bear!”  I looked at the man who was pointing at our sweatshirts.  Our sweatshirts mentioned Spotted Bear, Montana, which is the nearest named point of reference to the starting line of the Le Grizz 50-mile ultramarathon.  All of that was quite a ways away; in fact, some five dollar-bill lengths westerly of where we stood, as the crow flies.

I do not know now, and likely never will know for sure, what a runner looks like, having been passed by short, tall, thin, and not so thin people posing as runners as the years have passed, but suffice it to say that these two trail side greeters did not look like runners.  I looked at them and asked, “Why on earth do you know where Spotted Bear is?”

“Well,” the man replied, “we were in Hungry Horse and asked a ranger how far it was to Martin City.  He pointed and said a couple of miles that way, or, pointing off to the right, about 100 miles that way.  Just be sure to turn left when you get to Spotted Bear.  It was almost dark by the time we got to the junction, so we just camped there that night.  That is one long lake to drive around; way too many picture-taking pauses for us.”

Their stop-and-go driving sounded like our run-and-pause running.  A lot more ground could be covered in the same amount of time, but it would not leave time for reading shirts or for east meeting west or for pausing somewhere in Montana.

As a matter fact yes, I used to live in the tiny town of Hungry Horse  It was quite some time ago, I worked as a backcountry ranger for the USFS and my wife worked at Glacier Park.

Hungry Horse always makes me feel sad and laugh at the same time.  The cartoons of the emaciated horse everywhere are just too much!  Gorgeous place, though.