I’ve known Laurel for over ten years now since her youth group bike trips brought her to the islands throughout high-school. Following her adventures on social media, it’s easy to see that she’s nothing short of a badass. She’s an avid outdoors woman, getting out amongst it in whatever form possible. One of her accomplishments includes a Mt. Rainier summit…twice, once with her now fiance Josh.
When we were talking about locations for their engagement session, having an adventure session around Mt. Rainier seemed like a natural. We were a little concerned about snow since many trail options were covered with snow or closed off. Snow wouldn’t have stopped us, but with a more limited time frame we found a spot with great views of Mt. Rainier, all while only about 90 minutes from Seattle proper.
Before I go on, I’d like to refer to Mt. Rainier by her proper names- Tahoma/Tacoma. I’m more familiar with Tahoma, but know there are two variants to know.
Tahoma is known for being an illusive mountain. In Washington the saying “oh the mountains are out” is fairly common due to the rolling low hanging clouds and mist maintaining our PNW “moodiness.” We weren’t sure if we were going to get much of a view, but since the clouds were SO low hanging my hope was that we’d get some inversion layers once we got up to elevation.
As we got closer to Mt. Rainier National Park, the clouds began to part, leaving behind my absolute favorite- low hanging mist in the evergreens.
The first few photos are from our drive into the park before we met up with Laurel and Josh. When I get to go to epic locations for adventure sessions, Evan usually comes along with me to do a bit of landscape photography while I’m adventuring with my couples or families. I won’t digress too much, but he’s an amazing landscape photographer!
Once we got to the parking lot, Evan took off to grind on a few images of the lake and Mt. Tahoma, while Josh, Laurel, and I walked around catching up, and taking photos. The lighting of the day was kind of strange. We had a lot of blue light, BUT Tahoma came out in full force, with rolling inversion layers surrounding her.
Laurel and Josh were natural and a lot of fun to work with. We spent a lot of the session laughing and spending time being in awe of the area we were in. Laurel is also a very talented wedding photographer, so it was awesome hearing about her work as well.
While I won’t be shooting their wedding in the summer (but they are working with one of the absolute tops in the adventure wedding industry, so I’m so stoked to see their wedding images), I’m so honored that we got to adventure together to Tahoma and Mt. Rainier National Park for their engagement photos.
It has been awesome getting a chance to explore areas around Seattle for engagement and wedding photos now that we moved to Seattle. I’m really familiar with photographing around Mt. Baker (Koma Kulshan) and the North Cascades around there, but now moving down south has given me the opportunity to spend more time in Mt. Rainier National Park, the North Cascades/Mountain Loop Hwy, and The Olympic Peninsula (our absolute fav place).
Cheers to a fantastic engagement session, and congrats to Laurel and Josh!
