Heather Lake is an incredibly popular trail, and if you look online, it’s easy to see why. Beautiful lake surrounded by mountains, green pines, blue water… an absolute dream. That’s the trail I was on, but I knew that wasn’t going to be my experience. The fog was incredibly thick, and it had been raining for much of the night, so everything was damp and misty and full of atmosphere. Atmosphere. Not views.
God but the rain made everything incredibly green and lush.
The forest was so full of fog that it just faded into milky nothingness, making my surroundings beautiful but a little eerie. Sometimes it was too quiet for comfort.
No artificial spotlight here, just a section of the forest where it was a little lighter, making the woods in the distance look downright sinister.
The higher I got, the more intense the fog became. The trail was highly technical for someone who was used to hiking on the east coast, and I spent long stretches of the climb trying to work out how to get myself up the boulders and tree roots without slipping (because everything was wet) or walking through 4” of mud (because everything was wet). This was not one of those aesthetic hikes you see on Instagram.
Then I got to the lake. “The lake.” There was water and a shore and the vague outlines of trees that indicated you hadn’t completely crossed over into another realm, but there was no lake. I mean, not really. Certainly no mountains. No reflections of mountains. Just endless white obscuring everything more than 30 feet out.
The trail goes all the way around the lake, so I was able to confirm that, from every possible angle, there was zero visibility.
Okay, I’ll admit, some of these shots do indeed look like you might be crossing over into another realm. At this point, I probably wouldn’t mind.
Resisting the urge to make a lady of the lake reference here.
This ended up being one of my favorite shots of the day. The tree and the boulder look like ancient forest spirits.
This really was just part of the trail leading around the lake, but with the dark wood and heavy fog, even I have to admit it looks like something out of a supernatural horror movie.
The trail was every bit as slippery and challenging and muddy on the way down as it was on the way up. In some cases, because it’s easier to see up and pick out a path that makes sense than it is to discern the same looking down, I ended up getting myself into quite a pickle. Thankfully, because it’s an incredibly popular hike, there were lots of people going up who lent me a literal hand to get me unstuck. One nice young man asked if you could see the lake, and I felt awful telling him that, no, you couldn’t see much of anything at all.
As a photographer, I loved the conditions. They made for so many interesting compositions beyond just the standard lake-mountains-reflection that you generally get at places like this. And don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely going to return to this hike to get those standard shots, too, but I might’ve been one of the very few people that day who wasn’t the least bit disappointed by the weather.
