The Picket Range in the North Cascades of Washington is one of the most remote and rugged mountain areas in the lower 48 states. The peaks — Fury, Terror, Challenger, Despair — have names that tell you something about the terrain.
I went in alone in late August, carrying ten days of food and a 70-pound pack. The approach from the Cascade River Road takes two days of hard bushwhacking through old-growth forest and across boulder fields before you reach the high country.
The Pickets are not a place for casual hikers. The trails, such as they are, are unmaintained and often disappear entirely. Route-finding requires map and compass skills and a willingness to commit to difficult terrain.
But the rewards are extraordinary: glaciers, wildflower meadows, and a sense of wilderness that is increasingly rare. I saw no other people for seven days.
Divide Lookout sits on a ridge in the Mount Hood National Forest with views of Hood, Adams, St. Helens, and Rainier on a clear day. I first visited it as a young man working for the Forest Service, and returned decades later on a volunteer trail crew.
The trail crew work is hard — clearing blowdowns, rebuilding water bars, cutting brush — but deeply satisfying. There is something about working with your hands in the mountains that clears the mind.
The lookout itself is a classic 1930s CCC structure, perched on a rocky summit with a catwalk around the outside. It is still staffed in fire season and available for rent in the off-season.
Returning to a place you knew as a young person is always a complicated experience. The mountains are unchanged; you are not.
In the late 1980s I was hired by adidas to shoot a series of advertising campaigns that took me to locations around the world — track meets in Europe, marathons in Asia, and training camps in Africa.
The work was demanding and exhilarating. You had to be in the right place at the right moment, anticipating the action before it happened. Sports photography at the professional level is as much about preparation and positioning as it is about reflexes.
I shot on film — Kodachrome 64 and Ektachrome 200 — with Canon F-1 bodies and a range of lenses from 20mm to 400mm. The logistics of keeping film cold and getting it processed in remote locations were considerable.
The images from those years remain some of my favorites. There is an energy and immediacy to sports photography that is hard to replicate in other genres.
It happened on a gray December afternoon at Cannon Beach. We were walking on the beach after Christmas dinner when we saw the crowd gathered at the water's edge.
A man had been swept off the rocks by a sneaker wave — the kind that comes without warning, much larger than the waves before it. By the time the Coast Guard arrived it was too late.
The Oregon Coast is beautiful and dangerous. The water is cold — hypothermia sets in within minutes — and the waves are unpredictable. Every year people are killed by sneaker waves, usually because they turned their back on the ocean.
I have been going to the Oregon Coast all my life and I have never turned my back on the ocean. That afternoon reminded me why.
I taught social studies at Adams High School in North Portland from 1969 to 1973. Adams was one of the most diverse schools in Oregon — students from every background, every neighborhood, every circumstance.
Teaching there was the most challenging and rewarding work I have ever done. The students were smart, engaged, and hungry for knowledge. They pushed back when they disagreed with you, which was often.
Over the years I have received letters from former students — some tracking me down through the internet, some through mutual acquaintances. They remember things I have forgotten and have forgotten things I remember.
Teaching leaves marks that you cannot see at the time. You plant seeds and walk away. Sometimes, decades later, someone writes to tell you what grew.
Adams High School opened in the fall of 1969 in the Kenton neighborhood of North Portland. It was a new school in every sense — new building, new faculty, new students drawn from a rapidly changing neighborhood.
The school was named for John Adams, the second President of the United States. It served a predominantly African American community at a time of great social change — the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the beginnings of the counterculture were all present in the hallways.
I was hired as a social studies teacher for the opening year. I was 24 years old and had no idea what I was doing. The students taught me as much as I taught them.
Adams closed in 2002 due to declining enrollment. The building still stands, converted to other uses. But the school lives on in the memories of the thousands of students who passed through its doors.
In the summer of 1970 I was climbing on the south face of Mount Hood with two friends when the weather changed suddenly. What had been a clear morning became a whiteout within an hour.
We were on the upper mountain, above the bergschrund, when the storm hit. Visibility dropped to a few feet. We roped up and began descending by compass bearing, moving slowly and carefully.
I lost my Rollei 35 camera in the descent — it slipped from my pack and disappeared into the snow. I was too focused on getting down safely to mourn it at the time.
We made it down safely, arriving at Timberline Lodge cold and shaken. The mountain had reminded us, as it periodically does, that it is not a place to be taken lightly.
Two-up touring — riding a motorcycle with a passenger — is a different experience than solo riding. You are responsible for another person, which changes how you ride and how you think about risk.
My wife and I toured the Pacific Northwest for several summers on a BMW R90S. We rode the Olympic Peninsula, the Cascades, the Oregon Coast, and the high desert of eastern Oregon.
The best roads for two-up touring are the ones with long sweeping curves and good pavement — Highway 20 over Santiam Pass, Highway 242 over McKenzie Pass, the road along the Rogue River.
We stopped often to take photographs. The motorcycle is a good platform for photography — you can cover a lot of ground and stop anywhere, and the pace is slow enough to see things you would miss in a car.
I have a bird feeder in my backyard in Southeast Portland. It attracts the usual urban birds — house sparrows, house finches, chickadees, and the occasional junco in winter.
One morning I watched a drama unfold at the feeder. A crow had landed on the fence post above the feeder and was watching the sparrows below. The sparrows ignored it — crows are a constant presence in the neighborhood.
Then one sparrow, bolder than the rest, flew up and landed on the fence post next to the crow. The two birds regarded each other for a long moment. Then the crow flew away.
I don't know what to make of it. But I have been watching birds for fifty years and I have never seen a sparrow face down a crow. There is more going on in the bird world than we know.
My first darkroom was the kitchen of my apartment on SE Hawthorne in Portland. I hung a blanket over the window, set up trays on the counter, and developed my first rolls of film by the light of a red safelight.
The process was magical — watching an image appear in the developer tray, the shadows coming first, then the midtones, then the highlights. I was hooked immediately.
I shot Tri-X Pan film at 400 ASA, pushed to 1600 in the developer for available light work. The grain was heavy but the tonality was beautiful — that distinctive Tri-X look that defined documentary photography for decades.
I still miss the darkroom. Digital photography is more convenient and more flexible, but it lacks the physicality of working with film and chemistry. There was something about the smell of fixer that said: this is real.
Between the two World Wars, religious pacifism played a significant role in shaping public opinion and political debate in both Britain and the United States. Organizations like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the War Resisters League drew their membership largely from Protestant churches.
The pacifist movement of the 1920s and 1930s was not simply a reaction to the horrors of the First World War, though that experience was central to it. It was also rooted in a theological tradition that saw war as incompatible with Christian ethics.
The movement's influence peaked in the early 1930s with the Oxford Pledge, in which thousands of British students vowed never to fight for king and country. In the United States, the Nye Committee hearings on munitions makers reinforced the view that the First World War had been fought for profit.
The rise of fascism in Europe forced a painful reckoning. By the late 1930s many religious pacifists had concluded that there were circumstances in which war was the lesser evil. The movement fractured, and has never fully recovered.