left|thumb|220x220px|"Piute Pass," c. 1924.Daken painted in over two dozen federal and state parks, forests, and monuments in the western region of the United States including Tahoe National Forest and Yosemite National Park. In 1922, he embarked on a months-long winter trek into the Lake Tahoe region in the Sierra Nevada, resulting in an assemblage of 100 High Sierra works titled the "Northern California Alps" collection. In the 1924, Daken led a two-month art expedition into Piute Pass in the John Muir Wilderness, joined by a cameraman and fifteen fellow Impressionists.  In 1926, he led a second group of artists into the Rogue River and McKenzie Pass regions of Oregon.  Daken wrote "Experiences in the Rugged West," a short story about his eight-week mining trip and surviving an avalanche in the Sierra Nevada mountains, published in 1928 in The Wasp, a San Francisco weekly tabloid.
