David Howland Photo
A smoky sunrise landscape at Sparks Lake, Oregon, featuring snow-capped South Sister glowing with warm orange light on its summit, framed by dark silhouetted evergreen trees on a grassy bank, with the entire scene — mountain, trees, and pastel sky — perfectly mirrored in the still foreground lake water.

Smoky Sparks Lake Sunrise

Whenever I travel I try to find the best places to go take some photos. This usually leads to an article like “10 Great Landscape Photography Spots in Bend” which features a list of ten spots where everyone goes to try to take the same photo they’ve seen on Instagram.

I usually try to avoid that and instead try to find different compositions or different spots entirely so that I’m actually taking a photo that I like as opposed to something that I saw and am trying to recreate. Sometimes, however, the best spots are the best for a reason and that’s the case with Sparks Lake. My brother and I bounced along the dirt road to the parking area in the dark and found the path that leads along the lake. With the dry winter, the water was really low but in the early morning it was still perfectly calm with a slight mist gathering on the surface.

Some wildfire smoke had blown in from eastern Washington overnight but as the sun rose it still lit up some isolated spots on the slopes of South Sister. I walked all around the slopes of the lake finding different compositions with the trees and mountain arranged different ways. It was pretty difficult to take a bad photo, though. This lake is one of the most stunningly beautiful places I’ve ever been.

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A view across Sparks Lake at dawn showing Broken Top, a jagged mountain peak with patches of snow, in the background; a line of dense pine forest along the near shoreline; and a band of amber-tinted mist hovering just above the lake's calm surface, with the mountain and trees reflected in the water below it.
A panoramic winter sunrise landscape showing the snow-dusted Cannonball peaks in the foreground, rolling blue-toned hills in the middle distance, and Mount Mansfield and the Green Mountains glowing with warm alpenglow light on the far horizon beneath a vivid orange and pink sunrise sky.
A panoramic winter sunrise photograph taken from a snow-covered rocky summit, looking across Franconia Notch with snow-dusted evergreen trees in the foreground, rocky outcroppings at center, and the illuminated peaks of Cannon Mountain, Little Haystack Mountain, and Mount Lincoln bathed in warm golden-pink sunrise light against a pale blue sky with wispy clouds.
A panoramic winter sunrise photograph showing snow-dusted Mount Flume in the foreground and the Sandwich Range silhouetted in deep blue against a glowing pink, lavender, and orange sky with the sun just cresting the distant ridgeline.