I thought it would be fun to take pictures of Cascade sunsets from above to get more comfortable with using my drone. For eight consecutive days, I flew my DJI drone up to an altitude of 100 feet from my backyard. The mountains featured in these photos are approximately 26 miles away, as the crow flies.
These pictures show several volcanoes that are a part of Oregon’s Cascade Mountain Range. I recently featured aerial pictures of them from a closer perspective in another post.
Hope you enjoy these images of our spectacular skies near Bend, Oregon!
Colorful Cascade sunsets
The first photo shows a fiery sky. These are more commonly seen in the winter months around here.
January 23, 2025
The second photo shows a pale yellow background with the clouds floating over the mountains edged in pink.
January 24, 2025
Blue sky sunsets
The third photo shows a mostly clear sky. There appears to be a haze of smoke that could be from one of our prescribed burns in local forests. These controlled fires help prevent bigger fires.
January 25, 2025
The fourth photo shows another clear sky.
January 26, 2025
The fifth photo shows yet another clear sky. This time I took the photo right as the sun was setting over the mountains.
January 27, 2025
The next photo shows… uh, maybe we should pause for musical interlude. This song, Blue Sky & The Painter by Bastille, is one of my current favorites and it’s about blue skies.
Why did I include an interlude? Because there were more days without a single cloud in the sky when the sun set!
The sixth photo shows a clear day as the sun sets.
January 28, 2025
The seventh day shows, you guessed it, another sunny clear day.
January 29, 2025
Based on these photos, is it really true that Bend, Oregon gets 300 days of sunshine a year? Nope. However, we do have 250-260+ days a year that are clear or mostly clear.
Stormy Cascade sunsets
The eighth day shows, HURRAY!, clouds as a storm was moving in. A thick, dark cloud floated ominously over the snow-covered peaks.
The Oregon Cascade Range gets quite a bit of snow each winter. Mount Bachelor (shown on the left in these photos), as I stated in another post, gets over 400 inches of snow a year.
January 30, 2025
I may try taking sunrise pictures for a future post. I just hope that if I do, the clouds will cooperate. 😉
The sky takes on shades of orange during sunrise and sunset, the colour that gives you hope that the sun will set only to rise again.
Ram Charan
We have many beautiful sunrises and sunsets here in Bend, Oregon. Sometimes the unique colors and forms of the clouds are totally unexpected and they’ll take your breath away. Here are a few of those moments my camera allowed me to capture.
In my backyard, an old western juniper tree serves as my muse. Hope you enjoy these pictures that show the many moods of my muse through the seasons. The moods in the sunsets range from a quiet blush to a loud show of anger.
My cover image shows a rainbow of emotions surrounding the tree.