I’m trying something new - a separate post that’s mainly just the photos I took with my camera, rather than my phone. So there will be some that are similar to what was in the related main post, but there will be some new things as well. There will likely be less textual content to go with it, but let’s see how this goes.

Note: You should be able to click on almost all of the images to open them up larger, if you want to see them in more detail.

In the original post, I had mentioned that we had a nest of baby birds in the tree near the deck. There were three babies, all very close to fledging. It looked like only one adult was around to feed them, and she was busy. It’s pretty hard to ID these ones, but my best guess so far is Cassin’s Vireo. I got a number of decent pictures of the babies in the nest.

One other interesting sequence that I got was mom cleaning out the nest. A mother’s work is never done…

Mom taking off with one of the babies “packages”…

On the last day, we even saw the babies take their first, short flights from the nest! I managed to get some shots of them after then had flow a very short distance to branches in the same tree, close to the nest. They would go out for a short while, then fly back to the nest.

One of the babies, after flying the nest.

Two of the little ones testing their wings.

As we were heading south, but just north of Leavenworth, Justine noted a spot along the road with a pretty spectacular view of the river and surrounding mountains. We stopped to take a few photos.

Our stop at the Leavenworth Fish Hatchery was better than expected! We had a great tour and got to see lots of salmon.

The fish hatchery building is original from when the facility was created and reflects the styling of the day. It’s quite impressive.

Inside the building, all of the eggs are raised into fingerlings in these green tubs. 1.2M every year.

The fingerlings then get moved outside where the stay for a year.

Closer look at the fingerlings in their tanks.

The fish ladder at the end of the river lets the returning adults climb up to the holding tanks, where the 5k or so that return each year are used to generate the next generation.

Some of the returned adults.

There were some big fish in the holding tanks!

The end of the river. It’s a beautiful spot.

The drive south is always one we enjoy. Just north of Yakima it turns to the more desert landscape.

Where the road climbs, it offers a pretty spectacular view back over where we came from. You can see the line of wind turbines and a few mountains in the distance.

There are lots of vineyards in the area, as you can see in the bottom right.

The rest stop we chose for our lunch break was near this amazing bridge of a dry creek bed.

A bit more of a close-up of the bridge.

Our last stop before hitting the Columbia River, was again a pull off on the side of the road. We had seen some views of the mountains, but the real star of the show was the old barn and the decent light. Would have been better in a few hours, but it was not like we could wait…