Hello. I've been putting off making this call for about 2 years now. Kept telling myself I'd find some explanation. That I'd figure out what I was looking at. But I haven't. And at this point, I don't think I'm going to. I'm a photographer. Have been for thirty years, give or take. Started back in college when my uncle gave me his old Pentax K1000. Fell in love with the process. The mechanical feel of it, the waiting, not knowing what you've captured until you develop the roll. Digital never did it for me. I know that makes me a dinosaur, but there's something about film. The way it sees things differently than your eye does. I do landscapes mostly. Pacific Northwest stuff. Forests, coastlines, mountains. I've had some pieces in galleries, sold a few prints here and there. Nothing major. It's more of a serious hobby than a career at this point. I teach high school history for the actual paycheck. But photography, I'm telling you, that's the thing that keeps me sane.
This was October of 2019. I'd been planning a solo trip up to Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington. There's a section in the eastern part, near the Dark Divide, that's supposed to be some of the most remote old-growth forest left in the lower 48. I'd wanted to shoot it for years. My wife thought I was crazy for going alone. We'd had an argument about it the night before, actually. She wanted me to wait until spring, go with my buddy Carl who does backcountry stuff. But the fall colors were peaking and I didn't want to miss the light. Stupid thing to remember, but I left the house that morning without saying goodbye properly. Still bothers me. I brought my Mamiya RB67. Medium format camera, shoots 120 film. Beautiful machine. Heavy as hell, but worth it for the resolution. I had four rolls of Kodachrome 64 with me. Ten exposures per roll on that camera. Forty shots total for a three-day trip. You learn to be selective when every frame costs you.
The trailhead was about six miles from the nearest paved road. I parked at a pull-off and hiked in. It was overcast that first day, thick cloud cover, that Pacific Northwest gray that sits on everything like a wet blanket. Visibility maybe a hundred yards in the trees. I didn't see another person the entire trip. Not one. No other cars at the pull-off, no voices on the trail, no footprints in the mud except mine. That's what I wanted. That kind of isolation changes how you see things. The forest gets bigger when you're alone in it. The trees in there are massive. Douglas firs, western red cedars, some of them eight, ten feet across. They've been growing for five, six hundred years. Standing among them, you feel like you're in a cathedral. Everything quiet except the dripping of water from the canopy. I set up my tripod every quarter mile or so, took my time composing each shot[ I'm telling you, it was the most peaceful three days I'd had in years.
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