March 2022

by Mary
March 2022
The first of three times I have been there. Struggling to light it was a challenge this time too; all of these photos have the exposure dialled way down, to avoid looking like the brightest gloomy forest there ever was.
July 2025
The Double Cross Trail, perhaps the longest walk I have ever done, a cold and windy day in mid-summer.
May 2025
This was my third visit to Muir Woods, but the first in my increasingly last-in-first-out photo processing queue. My longest Muir Woods walk by far, as we hiked up to Cardiac Hill via the Dipsea Trail and back down Stapelveldt and Ben Johnson (trail guide).
It is not, in reality, anything like as dark as this under the canopy of the redwoods on a bright May day, but I was wearing dark and red-tinted sunglasses and was keen to recreate the experience by underexposing my photos too.
It’s called Cardiac Hill, because, obviously. We shared it with people running the Stinson Beach marathon:
If you ascend Dipsea and then go down Stapelveldt / Ben Johnson as we did, you have to do the ascent mostly in the sun, but then you get to do the return in the shade: