This was taken in August a few years ago, but is one of my favorite memories. I was up in Alaska visiting my Aunt Maisie with my sister. We drove up the Haines Highway into Canada for a day trip and got out to walk around before heading back. There has just been an early snowfall dusting the peaks and it was quite spectacular.
This image was sitting around unloved. The problem was that in color it was BORING. I was going through my past shots and hitting the “V” key (while in LIghtroom). That is a shortcut key for converting an image to Black and White. When I got to this image, I stopped. It definitely showed promise, so I spent the additional time on it to adjust it further (the default black and white conversion is pretty generic). A good reminder to never take things at first glance.
The Dosewallips River road was washed out 20 years ago, or so. This section is now closed to motor vehicles, but makes a great walk. The Dosewallips valley is on the east side of the Olympic Peninsula. It has been closed for years while they attempt to come up with a plan to reroute the road without endangering salmon in the river … and keep the cost down (since to move the road away from the river at the wash out point would be an extensive relocation up the hillside).
This is downtown Port Townsend’s main intersection. The traffic light is set to blink red in all directions … but because the lights are mounted on the street corners instead of hanging in the middle of the road, there are a lot of drivers (especially visitors) that miss the lights and run the intersection. Fortunately, the speed limit is 20 mph and traffic is slow.
I was going through my images and found these two that were taken at about the same spot 15 years apart. I thought it was real interesting to see the changes. The road is washed out about 5 miles from here … and so it hasn’t been maintained since the storms of 2001. So the top photo was after 5 years of erosion. The bottom photo is 15 years later, in 2021.
Walking the roads in Fort Worden, you can often find yourself sharing the roads with deer. In the image below, the young deer (a yearling) is experiencing its first snow. It’s mother is off the road to the right … the teen-fawn seemed a little uncertain about this cold white stuff. And I imaged it was wondering if mom was going to order out dinner.
