Rainbow Ridge

Plumose anemones are not plants, though the wall they cover looks like a garden. Each is an animal: a column of muscle with a crown of feathery tentacles that filters the water passing over it, and in Browning Pass the water passes fast.

They reproduce by tearing themselves in two, so a cluster like this is likely one animal copied. White, orange and the green of the Pacific Northwest in December, where daylight arrives already tinted.

Three stood together on the wall with the cold green water behind them. One strobe at twelve o'clock and one at four as fill, two stops down, which is what puts texture on a cold-water wall where two even strobes flatten it. Hurst Island, British Columbia.