Yes, Darker View has been a bit quiet lately. I have been not only off-island but out of the country for the last couple weeks. I flew to Portland to join my parents on a trip to Nicaragua.
A Nicaraguan farmer leaning against the wall of his home in Tierra AmarillaWe spent ten days in Nicaragua, the first part of the trip helping out with El Porvenir, an NGO that does water and sanitation work with rural farming communities. The last part of the trip was spent playing tourist, traveling the Rio San Juan on the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The trip allowed me to spent a good deal of time with my parents, do more than a little photography, and visit a beautiful country.
Back at home and back online, I have a series of posts in the works to record my experiences. The trip was extraordinarily memorable, with interesting stories to share. Along the way I did a lot of photography, thus I have gigabytes of material that needs to be sorted through. The best of this will appear here on DV as I have a chance to process it. My hope is that I can preserve a bit of the experience here in blog form. Not only for you to read, but as a record that I can read many years from now to remember this wonderful trip.
Another pick from the slides I am busily digitizing. After basic training and tech school with the USAF and before deployment to England, I took a month’s leave. Much of this was spent visiting favorite places around Portland in the late fall of 1986…
Latourell Falls in the Columbia River Gorge
The transit mall in downtown Portland
The newly completed MAX line from Gresham stops in downtown Portland
Sunset lights Mt. Hood in pastel shades
The Portland skyline at night, at least as it appeared in 1986
A nightime view looking over downtown Portland from Council Crest
More scanning, more memories. Taking these old photos out of the boxes has been fun. So many little treasures on celluloid. Photos of myself as a teenager, photos of the neighborhood I grew up in. There is so much of my life stowed away out of reach, converted to digital they live again…
Mt. Hood from highway 35
Middle North Falls in Silver Falls State Park
Silver Creek flows through Silver Falls State Park
The south face Mt. St. Helens a few years after the 1980 eruption with lahars in the foreground
A lahar (mudflow) from the lahar viewpoint on Muddy River and forest road 83
The constellation Orion taken with a simple tracking platform and Ektachrome film
Sunset as seen from from the front porch of my childhood home on Bull Mtn.
Sunrise Lane covered in a fresh snowfall
Jerry’s old barn across the street from my childhood home
As I scan slides I find little treasures like this one. A foggy morning on the Little Ouse river near Thetford, England, a place I called home for nearly three years. Yes, there is really a river named the Little Ouse!
Sunrise over the Little Ouse, near Santon Downham, England
One of the first binders of slides I grabbed for digitizing happened to be a trip through Switzerland that I took in 1987 with my family.
I was living in England at the time with the USAF. My parents and brother joined me there. We then crossed the channel from Dover to Calais, changed trains in Paris, taking a high speed train to Lausanne. From there my brother and I bounced around with some Swiss bus and rail passes until we rejoined my parents in Zermatt.
It was a memorable trip, there is so much I can remember from thirty five years ago. Going through these old slides certainly brought back memories!
Dover Castle lit up at night
Arriving at the Paris Norde train station from Calais
The Eiffel tower over central Paris
The Lausanne Catherdral looms above the city
Chapel Bridge in Lucern
Herding cattle up a Swiss mountain highway
The Madonna del Sasso church above Locarno, Switzerland
A train navigates a mountain railway on the way to Domodossola, Italy
The Matterhorn as seen from near the top of the Gornergrat cable car
As is my habit, I have produced a video summary of this summer’s voyage in the Nordic Quest. Take a few of the best photos, a little video, a snippet of timelapse, a decent tune, and mix well…
Having done this more than a few times now it is getting harder to be creative. Still there are always unique shots that come back from any voyage, such as the mother grizzly and cubs. There is also a sequence I had always wanted to try, a timelapse of the huge Alaskan tide change. This time I had a chance to shoot it, and had some success.
Ten days on the boat out of Juneau, our annual family trip fishing in Alaska is complete. This summer it was an all family affair… My mother and father, my brother and his wife, and their grandson Andre. Add Deb and myself for a total of seven aboard the Nordic Quest for ten days of fishing and exploring. The plan was to head south of Juneau, down Stephen’s Passage for the Frederick Sound area.
First stop was Taku Harbor for the night with the following day spent attempting to fish salmon in Stephen’s Passage. A pretty day, but no fish. The only luck we had was a single crab in one of the pots left overnight in Taku.
The towering wall of ice that is Dawes Glacier in Endicott ArmOn to Endicott Arm and Dawes Glacier. The weather was not great for visiting the ice, but we did arrive at low tide, the best time to see calving. We were rewarded by the sight of several ice-falls as the water level fell and the face of the glacier crumbled.
An afternoon spend fishing Halibut was rewarding as well, plenty of fish landed along with one hundred pound specimen caught by Andre. A halibut that big can not be gaffed and simply lifted into the cooler. Instead I harpooned the fish off the swim deck. My first harpoon shot was a bit off, hitting low, a second was much better, right through the spine behind the gills. Good this too, the fish promptly broke the steel leader. Two harpoon lines attached insured this fish was headed for the freezer.
