Mount Baker reflection in Picture Lake autumn
— — the week the mountain sits twice in the lake.
Not only on a wall.
“Picture Lake holds in its surface what is widely considered the most-photographed view of the North Cascades. In the autumn week, usually the second or third in September, when the huckleberry and mountain ash turn red along the slopes and the wind drops out of the basin, the small tarn becomes a mirror. From the loop trail along its eastern shore the peak comes back doubled, snowfields and all. The basin sits in the Mt. Baker Wilderness above Heather Meadows, an hour above where the ski area runs in winter. The rest of the year the lake is mostly under snow.
Mount Baker reflection in Picture Lake autumn, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Picture Lake is a small subalpine tarn in the Heather Meadows area of the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, sitting at about 4,200 feet (1,280 m). It lies just off the upper end of State Route 542, the Mount Baker Highway, a mile below the terminus at Artist Point. A half-mile loop trail circles the lake. The peak that returns in the reflection is Mount Shuksan (9,131 ft), which rises to the east of the basin; Mount Baker (10,781 ft) gives its name to the surrounding wilderness and is the second great snowpeak in the area, visible from other vantages. The lake is in Whatcom County, Washington, roughly an hour east of Bellingham, in the Mt. Baker Ranger District.
The autumn red of the basin comes from two shrubs: western mountain ash (Sorbus sitchensis) and Cascade huckleberry (Vaccinium deliciosum), both of which turn crimson and scarlet by mid-September. The contrast with the year-round snowfields above is what makes the photograph so widely reproduced. The reflected peak is a Triassic-Jurassic complex of gneiss and granodiorite, and its hanging glaciers (Upper Curtis, Lower Curtis, and the Hanging Glacier) hold the white that the lake then doubles. Heather, paintbrush, and avalanche lily ring the basin earlier in the summer; the late-September week is what fills most of the calendars.
The road to Picture Lake reopens with the rest of the upper Mount Baker Highway, usually in late July or early August. Autumn colour peaks in mid- to late September, and most years the first lasting snow returns by late October, after which the gate closes for the winter. The lake is iced over from about November through June in most years. The window for the still-water reflection is narrow: typically the first hour of daylight, when the wind off the high ridges is still down. By mid-morning a breeze usually rises out of the Nooksack drainage and the mirror breaks.