Another Mountain

Yesterday we drove through the "Oregon Outback" until we reached Hwy 97, where we turned north for about 60 miles before cutting off on Hwy 26 to Portland. We were winding down Hwy 26 admiring the views when we noticed this mountain rising majesticaly about the landscape. Mt Hood....the king of the Cascades. I wanted a picture....I wanted one bad. Because I'd already introduced you to Mt Shasta, and you just needed to know Mt Hood as well. The problem here is that there was once again no where to pull off, traffic behind us, and about a million bug splatters in the windshield, plus it wasn't even in front of us, it was out the driver's side window and the driver was in the way of my shot.

SO...

I ran to the sleeper, flopped down on the bed, snatched up my camera, frantically wiped the doggy snot off the window from where my girls lay and look out the window, and draw pictures with their noses, and lick the window (a lot in Carlie's case...she's wierd but we love her), and started snapping pictures.

And these are what we got.

I wasn't satisfied with the shots so I grabbed my zoom lens, having not used it yet, and finding that it was surprisingly fast and easy to change lenses, and snapped a few shots like this.
WoW! It really made a difference!

Now....please excuse the blue tinting. I didn't realize the window was that much more tinted than the front until I plugged in my memory card and got to see the full size version of the picture. Things look a little gloomy in Oregon...but it was an incredibly beautiful Sunday afternoon.

Here's the sad part of the story. After snapping all those pictures of Mt Hood, I returned to the co-pilot's chair, at which point my wonderful observant husband said, "So....what's THAT mountain?"...as he points ahead of us to this giant of a mountain thats at least twice as big as the one I just finished photographing. (at that point a little column of steam started coming up off my head...but I got over it.)
So the pictures above with the unusual blue tinting are not Mt. Hood. I think its Mt Mitchel, which is just a measly little 5,599 feet, nothing compared to Mt Hood's 11,239ft. You think I would have noticed the difference. I never got a shot of Mt Hood, but I did get to ride around the base of it and a little way up its side, which is closer than we've ever been before.
At least Mt Mitchell was picturesque.