“So why do they call it ‘Burnt Lake’?” was one of the recurring questions I was asked after last week’s hike. To find an answer, I checked out Lewis McArthur’s Oregon Geographic Names, but Burnt Lake didn’t make the cut. I searched a lot of hiking sites and perused the ‘regional’ shelves at local bookstores and generally, most references to the lake include a story about a forest fire that wiped out an old growth cedar forest sometime around 1904. Supposedly, you can still see the stumps of the ex-forest if you hike to Burnt Lake from the north. I thought a dead forest might be interesting to photograph, but I also suspected that the trailhead for the north end of the Burnt Lake trail was beyond the washed-out bridge that still doesn’t go to the Ramona Falls trailhead either. It seemed prudent to come up with an alternative hike and The Portland Hiker’s Field Guide, because it has hikes arranged by area, made it extremely easy to find a nearby option ( http://www.portlandhikers.com/ )....
a photographer's take on ART, SCIENCE & THEOLOGY in the Pacific Northwest