“Complex” is indeed the word to use for this vast expanse of terrain in Washington state, comprised of clear, cold rivers, thick forest stands, and rugged mountains webbed with a network of trails, mostly backcountry and mostly for serious backpackers, with few access roads.

Lake Chelan National Recreation Area, Ross Lake National Recreation Area, and the north and south units of North Cascades National Park contiguously combine to form the North Cascades Complex, of which, unlike popular (and populous) national parks such as Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Grand Teton, there are fewer overlooks, pullouts, and short trails to grant the average traveler views with their cameras, and a lot more miles in between those spots. That said, I wanted to write this Armchair Photography Guide to show you that, even if you can’t or don’t want to photograph way out in the backcountry of the North Cascades, you can still get awesome shots using your smartphone, point-and-shoot, or SLR camera to show your friends, family, and colleagues the beauty of this 684,303-acre (1,069-square-mile) portion of the Pacific Northwest.

While it’s theoretically possible to visit the entire complex in a day (that would be a lot of driving and boating, folks), it’s not practical and your camera wouldn’t do total justice to the overwhelming grandeur of what many have named the “American Alps.”

Lake Chelan National Recreation Area

For most of us, the starting point for photography in Lake Chelan NRA will be the small, isolated community of Stehekin, about which I wrote in a previous Traveler article. While you can reach Stehekin via boat, seaplane, or hiking 23 miles from Highway 20, the majority of visitors take the Lady of the Lake ferry up Lake Chelan. The two-hour express ferry and four-hour regular ferry (which is what I took) navigate a relaxing scenic route up the 55-mile tongue of Lake Chelan and provide the perfect venue for capturing images as well as video of this slice of the North Cascades Complex.

You’ll want to spend most of your time in the open-air portion of the ferry, located in the back of the upper deck. Check your smartphone’s weather app, and if there is even the slightest chance of rain in either Lake Chelan or Stehekin, bring or wear a rain jacket and hat, in addition to some sort of rain covering for your camera. Online camera sites like BHPhoto and Adorama stock several brands like Vortex Media, Ruggard, and Optech USA. You can easily stuff this camera rain protection into your backpack or jacket pocket. If it does rain, I guarantee you’ll have practically the entire open deck to yourself. If it doesn’t rain, your jacket will help block the chill breezy winds.

While you should bring a tripod with you, I advise against using it on the ferry. There’s quite a bit of vibration underfoot, not to mention strong winds if you remain outside. Best to handhold your camera and use the “burst method” of holding down that shutter button for 4-5 successive clicks to ensure at least one sharp shot. Switch on your lens or camera image stabilization (IS for Canon, VR for Nikon, IBIS for Sony). SLR camera users might wish to set their focus for tracking movement (AI Servo for Canon, AF-C for Nikon and Sony) and should also affix a circular polarizer filter on their lens to reduce glare and haze, saturate both water and sky color, and add definition to any cloud cover. For those of you who don’t know what a circular polarizing lens is, check out this past Traveler article. A lens hood is helpful too, not only to prevent glare spots on your photos, but to protect against the elements.

Get wide-angle and telephoto shots of the steep-walled mountains on either side of the ferry. The lake varies from 1-2 miles in width, so those towering mountains are pretty close to you.

Photograph the ferry in relation to the scenery.

Stand near the back railing to capture images of the ferry’s wake (the water churned up behind the ship).

As the ferry nears Stehekin, photograph the approach to the Landing (boat dock, lodge, restaurant).

All along the Stehekin Valley Road are lovely, sometimes whimsical, scenes to photograph. Be mindful, though, of trespassing on private property, since cabins dot the lakeshore.

Depending upon the season you visit, wildflowers may be in bloom along the roadside. Include them as well as other little things you might spy, since they flesh out the photographic story of your national park visit.

Because of your location between the steep, close mountains, capturing sunrise and sunset is more a matter of capturing the morning and evening light, overall. To get great shots “uplake” and “downlake,” walk onto the furthest portion of the Stehekin Landing boat dock for your morning and evening photography. This is another place where you might wish to handhold your camera and use the burst method, rather than a tripod, since the floating dock continuously (but gently) bobs up and down.

Photograph those morning images early, because the atmosphere develops a slight haze around 8 a.m. – at least, it did during my early July visit, and I don’t know if that was the regular scheme of things or due to the forest fires burning to the north and south. If you use Adobe Lightroom as part of your photo editing process, there is a very cool Dehaze slider that works wonders.

Include parts of the dock in your images. It provides scale and reference. You might even want to include people in your shots for this same reason.

Use your powers of observation. Look all around you. During my visit, the covered portion of the dock housing the National Park Service boat sheltered barn swallow nests and their occupants.

Walk, rent a bike, or buy a bus tour ticket for the 3.5 mile trip to the 312-foot Rainbow Falls. Once you’ve arrived, there are two short trails leading to the falls. The shorter path descends to the lower portion of the falls, while the other, slightly longer path climbs to a fenced view area midway up the falls. You might feel a slight, cool spray on yourself and your camera at either location, so use your lens hood to shield the front of your lens from tiny droplets.

Rainbow Falls offers a great opportunity to practice “silky water” photography. You’ve seen images of waterfalls and whitewater creeks and rivers with that smooth, satiny, silky look, right? In photo parlance, that’s called “silky water,” and the key to achieving a shot like that is a slow shutter speed. The problem with using a slow shutter speed, though, is the longer the seconds tick off, the more light enters through your camera lens and the brighter your overall composition will appear, risking the chance of “blowing out” (overexposing) the entire image. The key to a successful silky water photo is to use a neutral density (ND) filter: a dark gray piece of glass or resin that screws on top of your SLR lens and allows you to use a slower shutter speed while keeping the rest of the image well-exposed but not overexposed. You’ll need your tripod for any silky water shot you capture, since handholding the camera and using a slow shutter speed is a recipe for a blurred photo.

While the image opportunities discussed thus far are within the Lake Chelan NRA, you’ll have the chance to photograph a small portion of the southern unit of North Cascades National Park by taking the Stehekin Red Bus Shuttle ($16 round trip) to the end of the road at High Bridge (the turnaround point for the shuttle). There, the entrance to the bridge spanning the Stehekin River is also the boundary between the NRA and the national park.

Get a leading line shot of the bridge. The term “leading line” refers to any line (straight, diagonal, or squiggly) that takes the viewer’s eye from one portion of the photo to another.

Use your camera’s 10-second timer or a wireless remote shutter release to capture a selfie of you on the bridge, too.

To the right of the sign at the bridge is a narrow trail leading down to the frothy, turquoise water of the Stehekin River and another great opportunity for you to practice your silky water shots, if you wish. Use your tripod for these images.

In addition to silky (or non-silky) water photos, the river makes great leading line shots, too.

Look up from your perch along the river to Include the High Bridge in one or more of your shots. Even better is to catch a backpacker crossing the bridge, adding a little scale and frame of reference to your image. Use the trees as natural frames on either side of the river and bridge. Natural frames are pleasing ways to frame and add impact to your image’s subject.

Hike back up the trail and cross the road to the wood log bench. From that spot, get a vertical shot downriver, using the trees as natural frames. Rotate your polarizer filter to saturate water color and remove glare so you can see the rocks beneath the water. Nearby are a couple of other little paths to slightly different vantage points for further river and cliff wall photography.

When you’ve finished photographing the Stehekin River, cross the bridge, walk up the gravel road a little, then turn left onto the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT).

The PCT guides hikers into sun-sappled, shadowy green depths of the forest, perfect for more leading line photos. Trail photos create that sense of continued national park adventure. Where will that trail take you? Where would your viewer like that trail to take them?

Ross Lake National Recreation Area

Ross Lake NRA creates a dividing line between the north and south units of North Cascades National Park. Most people wanting to see the North Cascades will do so via the North Cascades Highway (State Route 20). You can begin your tour from either the west or east entrance to the park/NRA. I began on the west side from Seattle and drove to Newhalem, which is a great place for your photo journey to begin since you’ll want to stop at the North Cascades Visitor Center there. Before you do that, though, make sure you stop at the North Cascades National Park sign to get a selfie. 

From there, drive to Newhalem, follow the signs and turn right to cross that one-lane bridge over the Skagit River. Park in one of the marked spaces and walk back to the bridge. Before stepping up onto the small sidewalk next to the railing, get a middle-of-the-road shot, first.

I arrived early in the morning, around 9 a.m., so the sun was behind me as I stood on the bridge, allowing for well-lit exposures looking downriver. I used a circular polarizer to remove glare and see through the jade-green depths to the rocky river bottom.

At that spot, I used my telephoto lens to capture a zoomed image of the mountain in front of me.

Walking back to my car, I also used the telephoto lens for closeup photos of the pearly everlasting flowers in bloom, and a patch of glow-in-the-dark-green colored moss next to a conifer branch laying on a textured portion of concrete which made for interesting color, pattern and texture.

Drive the half-mile to the visitor center and get a few photos of the interior architecture. Visitor centers are neat subjects because they are built to blend in and be representative of their surroundings.

Behind the visitor center is the short Sterling Munro boardwalk trail to a view of the Picket Range.

Take advantage and get a leading line shot before continuing to the end.

You might even arrive there in time to sit in on a ranger-led presentation about the North Cascades, where you’ll learn about wildlife like the marmot and the pika and how climate change is altering their winter hibernation habits.

At the Picket Range view area, capture some wide-angle and telephoto shots of the scenery. While you are at it, photograph the descriptive sign, too. You might need to refer to that sign when naming your photo files or explaining something to those looking at your photos.

On the way back to your vehicle, stop and photograph any wildflowers you might see to flesh out your visit.

If something piques your interest as you drive along the visitor center road back toward Highway 20, park in a pullout or wide shoulder (where allowed) for a photograph.

You might arrive during the perfect time of day to photograph the sun shining through the tall stands of lodgepole pine. If that sun is peeking through the trees, you can get creative and add a sunburst to your composition. Set your camera’s aperture to f/22 to create an extremely narrow opening for the light to enter through the lens. Adjust your camera’s other settings to ensure a well-lit exposure. The small amount of light hitting the sensor refracts off of the lens’ shutter blades and the result will be a pointy-rayed sun.

Continue your drive on SR 20. Pull into the parking lot on the right side of the road at Gorge Falls to walk the short Gorge Falls Creek Loop Trail. Use the trees as natural frames for any wider-angle landscape photo ops, then finish your walk of the loop trail back to the parking lot. Note the geometry of the trail perpendicular to the tall trees.

Before returning to your car, walk along both sides of the metal bridge spanning Gorge Creek. Leave your tripod in the car since the metal bridge vibrates every time cars drive across it. Handholding your camera and using the burst method will work better in this instance.

From there, drive east approximately four miles and turn left onto Diablo Dam Road. Drive across the dam, then ¾ mile further to the gravel parking lot. If you read my article about the North Cascades Institute Environmental Learning Center’s Base Camp, then you’ll know it’s an ideal place to spend a couple of days while exploring the surrounding area. Even if you aren’t staying there, you can still walk the road back to and over Diablo Dam, getting interesting, curvy leading line images of the dam as well as the views on either side. Midday means the light will be directly overhead, with no shadows and the mountains will be a bit hazy.

Late evening, from 7:30 to 9 p.m., provides light at an angle, producing more depth, shadows, and color, as well as golden light on the tips of the surrounding mountains. A polarizer filter works well during that time, saturating colors and enhancing detail.

If you don’t wish to get any portion of Diablo Dam’s architecture into your mountain shot, simply move your camera viewfinder up and to the side a bit (or crop the dam out during photo editing). I happen to like the curvy structure of the dam as it brings to mind something I might run into if I was a character roaming the mountains of Middle Earth.

Stay awhile longer in this area and keep your eyes open for photo ops around you. Your peripheral vision might detect movement in the bushes.

While you can manage lovely shots of the turquoise-shaded Diablo Lake from this location, the power lines stretching across the sky from your side of the shoreline might get in the way of your landscape. A better vantage point for the lake and mountains is to return to the highway, turn left and drive a little less than 4.5 miles to the Diablo Lake Vista Point. Any time of day, anywhere along that view area, makes for awesome photos. Visit this overlook more than once, if you can, morning, noon, and night, or during different weather conditions, because the landscape looks different each time. That’s one of the benefits of staying overnight nearby, whether it’s at Colonial Campground or the Environmental Learning Center’s Base Camp. I could never have captured the images you see below had I not stayed a couple of days there.

A graduated neutral density (grad ND) filter comes in handy here because there is a marked difference between the light in the sky versus the light in the lake and surrounding forest and mountains The purpose of this filter is to even out the exposure, so you don’t overexpose the sky or underexpose the foreground.

After driving beyond that invisible border of Ross Lake NRA and North Cascades National Park as you continue your travels through eastern Washington, you should make absolutely certain to stop at the Washington Pass Overlook, even though it is not within North Cascades National Park. This one view will be the perfect ending image to place in your photo album for the North Cascades. Why? Because this stop offers an incredible view of the main route through the vast, stunning landscape of the Pacific Northwest’s North Cascades Complex, otherwise known as the American Alps. 

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