The Oregon coast is truly subtropical rainforest. The Vine Maple, Devil's Club, and other patient and tenacious species clinging to the vertical cliffs in your photos somehow thrive there. Similar refugia conceal relic populations of rare amphibians, like the Giant Salamander and Red-Legged Frog, which is now critically endangered in California, but yet remains locally abundant in Oregon.

Much of the same verdant growth extends from California to Southeast Alaska, although the Alexander Archipelago has far fewer species both due to the cooler clime, and it's recent exposure by the retreat of ice only a few thousand years ago.

I love this ecosystem. Only yesterday I saw a herd of ~50 Roosevelt Elk (Red Deer, the largest variety in the world) in a farmer's field near Sand Lake - another place of unique vista and ecological diversity and adaptation to a remarkable geological environment.

If you ever swing further north, I'd be happy to show you some of the secret nooks and crannies, where Old Growth Spruce and Hemlock meters thick leave their progeny to battle for the scarce light in their shadow, hereabouts.