Just to be clear, the dam below isn’t what made the pond above. I did see a beaver once in the pond, one day when I was there late in the evening. The dam below is across a ditch that was left from building the dike which kept out salt water from the fields used by a dairy farm. That was back in the olden days before the dikes were breached to provide salt marsh as habitat for salmon.
Going through my hiking photos from years past. I didn’t take nearly as many photos when it was foggy or misty or raining. Since I primarily hiked in the Olympic National Park, that meant that I had my camera in the pack a lot of days. After a while I got a couple of different waterproof (or resistant) cameras … first a Minolta and then a Nikonos. But the Minolta didn’t have a real good lens on it and the Nikonos was a brick. Like real heavy. I was delighted when I found the digital cameras became available in a waterproof, rugged vesion (my favorite was the Nikon AW series). These were all taken the same day, but I’m not sure what camera. It was film, though.
Driving around on backcountry roads you can find a lot abandoned churches and schools. Before transportation was motorized, schools and churches were local even in rural areas so that folks could access their services. The image above was taken somewhere out in the backcountry in north central Oregon, somewhere near Wasco … where the image of the storefront window below was shot. The church window gave me fits trying to get an image that didn’t look crooked. Oh well. I think it’s past it’s time of being worried about squared up.
Wasco is a small town in north central Oregon. It’s primarily a farming/cattle raising area. Like many rural towns it is struggling. Below is a boarded-up storefront window that I found interesting.
A while back I visited the Yellow Jacket Gold Mine, which was part of the Comstock Lode gold rush in the 1860’s and -70’s. I found it a little interesting and a whole lot sad. There was a large underground fire that spread through the mining district in April 1869, that started in the Yellow Jacket and killed 37 miners. Mining has always been a very dangerous occupation. All in the search for riches.
