Dear Readers, Happy and Prosperous New Year to you all!
Thank you for reading my blog. I started this blog in 2010, so this is the 16th year of trying to find and photograph the detritus, decay, and abandoned remnants of our modern world. We will start the new year with a series on eastern Washington. Later, we will see Greece, Turkey, New York City, Olympia, and more. Comments and suggestions are always welcome.
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| Packing enough stuff? (No, never) |
Background
By late summer (2024), my wife and I had spent months remodeling, cleaning out junk, sorting paperwork, and setting up life in a new home in the Pacific Northwest. I was restless and wiggly. She wanted me out of the house. And I had not driven through eastern Washington in 49 years. My 1981 car needed some serious highway miles and exercise. Time for a ROAD TRIP!
With a week-long itinerary and a generous offer to stay with an old college friend in Spokane, it was time to pack and set off. Traveling by car, I could take a tripod and both medium format (Hasselblad plus 4 lenses) and 35mm (Pentax Spotmatic F with 5 lenses). And I stashed spare water, tools, motor oil, munchies, a battery jump device, and car parts. Pack heavy? Who cares with a car.
For the next few articles, I will show some of the 35mm Kodak Portra 160 frames in the order of my trip. They progress through small towns, so look at a map of Washington if you are interested in the exact locations. I learned about some ghost towns from web pages that list such oddities and places to see. And I stopped when I saw a lonely farm or other interesting urban decay feature. Click any picture to see it expanded to 1600 pixels wide.
Tonasket
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| Aussie Antiques, Tonakset |
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| Wow, old time Jerry Cans |
Good stuff! I love these home-grown antique/junk stores full of treasures. I don't need any in my life, but it is great that someone recycles these remnants of an older age.
Tonakset is a quiet town north of Omak, where I spent the night. Tonasket had a very nice coffee shop right across the street from the Aussie Antiques.
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| Trailer with a view, Loomis-Oroville Highway (50mm ƒ/1.4 SMC Takumar lens) |
Heading west on the Loomis-Oroville Road toward Loomis, and you get into rolling hills with some agriculture mixed with cattle pasture. It was dry in late summer, the grasslands brown.
Nighthawk
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| Former Nighthawk general store (?) |
Nighthawk is a ghost town, but there are homes and residents, so it is not truly deserted. At the turn of the 20th century, Nighthawk was a booming mining town as well as a supply center for other mines in the area. The Great Northern Railroad came through this valley. Companies extracted copper, gold, lead, silver, zinc, and antimony from the surrounding area, but most mining ended in the 1950s. There is not much to see here any more, but the scenery is sublime.
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| Similkameen River northeast of Nighthawk (35mm ƒ/3.5 Super-Takumar lens) |
Oroville
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| Similkameen River west of Oroville |
The Girder Bridge (built 2010) carries the Similkameen Trail, a rail-to-trail conversion. The Great Northern Railroad once carried ore and minerals along this line into Oroville and further.
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| Chevrolet truck looking good on Central Avenue, Oroville |
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| Skeleton Man on patrol duty on Chesaw Road, Oroville |
From Oroville, I continued east on Chesaw Road towards the ghost town of Molson. To be continued...
These photographs are from Kodak Portra 160 film exposed with my Pentax Spotmatic F camera with various lenses, but mostly the 50mm ƒ/1.4. I scanned the film with a Nikon Coolscan 5000 film scanner.
