Pacific Northwest | Travels in the North American Pacific States
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Pacific Northwest

A thin band of emerald green forests, rivers and temperate islands extend up from the far north of California to the coastal fjords of Alaska. Three of the world's most promising cities: Portland, Seattle and Vancouver punctuate the green with a unique Cascadian culture. Follow me as I explore the North American Pacific Northwest.

 
   
       
  Thunder on the Zumwalt Prairie  

Pacific Northwest | July 18, 2012
Thunder on the Zumwalt Prairie

I'm on my way to the Zumwalt Prairie with my younger brother. We've arrived at the Oregon township of Imnaha, population 12, which sits nestled in a deep canyon of exposed yellowish-orange rock along the Imnaha River. We're being served a beer and a story at the local Tavern-General Store-Restaurant, which is decorated with rattlesnake skins, pictures of women holding elk antlers, and old-timey jokes about fishing.

Zumwalt Prairie

   
       
  Clayoquot Sound Photograph  

Pacific Northwest | October 7, 2011
Balancing Clayoquot Sound

Six Northwestern springtimes deposited six seasons of Pacific Northwest pollen on my white truck, turning it chartreuese. I was using the truck so infrequently that I neglected it's upkeep, and mosses and lichens were beginning to set along the rim of the windows, hornets were making their nests in the doors, and a few plants were beginning to grow in the roof rack and the rear-view mirrors.

Clayoquot Sound, B.C.

   
       
  Hood River Valley  

Shades of the Hood River Valley
Pacific Northwest | June 11, 2010
A line of bubbles is trailing through the water where Hood River flows into the Columbia. A head emerges from the water. And this complete stranger takes off his mask and yells, "yahooooooo!" before he realizes I'm standing there. He explains that he's been looking for an expensive piece to his kite board boom, which had sank here where Hood River enters the Columbia. He explains that he had been looking for it for over a week, and only after donning scuba gear did he find success.

Hood River, Oregon

   
       
  Oneonta Gorge  

River Civilization
Pacific Northwest | June 11, 2008
The Oregon Hotel is old, rickety and delightful, and in the geographic center of Oregon, in the smallish town of Mitchell. Weather has me holed up here - snowstorms east, rain west - a good night's sleep eludes me. The reason, some drunk hunter in 2C is blaring his television, his violent snores wafting between pauses in the television sound. I look for a way to fall asleep, so I turn on the television set.

Columbia Valley

   
       
  Frog  

The Barnacles of Kalaloch
Pacific Northwest | February
One way to give our hectic lives a big sigh is to just stand there by the tidepool rocks and look. It will be difficult, but not impossible, to find something new. When you grow up landlocked, you have no tidepools from which to examine your natural world. You have only your swamps and, frozen, your lakes through which unfolds a magnificent natural aquarium, if only until the first snow wrecks that sheet of glass. The frozen lake or the bog; they both contain a universe.

Pacific Olympic Peninsula

   
       
  Neah Bay  

The Artist and the Whale Hunter
Neah Bay | March 2004
There are parts of America so elusive, so far from anywhere, that they seem hardly to exist, like ghost civilizations. Neah Bay is that other America, the most northwesterly place in the continental states. It is a small fishing village, seemingly forever shrouded in a thick fog and a light drizzle, as if from a plane you could never know it was there. Just a few miles beyond it is the tip of America. Cape Flattery, a rugged natural outpost against the sea, settled by puffins and deep-diving birds.

Neah Bay, Washington

   
       
  Frog  

Bluegrass in Cascadia
Pacific Northwest | February
From the plane, I could see that long chain of solitary spires, an uneven line of volcanos which trace the route of an active fault line. The Three Sisters, then smaller cones, the heavenly Willamette Valley, and finally, Mount Hood and St. Helens and Rainier, shrouded by distance. Even at nine at night, the green-green of Cascadia was visible through the dark, and those solitary massifs were as visible as day.

Portland, Oregon

   
       
  Umpqua Dunes  

Umpqua Dunes Genesis
Pacific Northwest | November 2, 2006
| Part III of the oRegon Testament
My camping stove just blew up, and it's spraying fire all over the campsite. I've hauled Jane back down to the Central Oregon Coast…And I'm supposed to be cooking her a Native Oregon meal. Filled with setbacks and delays, I make a few key finds on the coast of Oregon.

Umpqua Dunes

   
       
  Wilammette River  

Foraging Nehalem Valley
Pacific Northwest | June 3, 2007 | Part IV of the Oregon Testament
Glowing Mushrooms, deer-meat, stone and a Portland underworld creating a world based on old ways. Part IV of the Oregon Testament gets me closer to my goal of seeing Oregon's native history through my own eyes.

Nehalem Valley

   
       
  Pelagic Birding off the Oregon Coast  

Perpetua Sea Bank
Pacific Northwest | September 17, 2009
I like to pass lazy afternoons looking for new places on the Oregon map. I like to believe there are places in this big state of diverse landscapes that hardly anyone knows about. Places just waiting to be discovered.

Newport, Or

   
       
  Sketches from Oregon and Portland  

Oregon Sketch Journal
Pacific Northwest | July 18, 2012
Sketching affords us a very different perspective than the modern digital pocket camera. Like large format photography, it demands you spend time with the place you visit. As I travel through Oregon this year, I've opted to spend more time illustrating it and see if the process can help me reveal more about the state.

Odell, Oregon

   
       
  Columbia River, South Jetty  

Sketches of the South Jetty
Pacific Northwest | June 02, 2009
Photography and captions from my travels along the Lower Columbia River and near Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River.

Lower Columbia River

 

 
 
 
 

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