Point Ruston Waterfront

Author's Comments

Most days the mountain is not there. That is the first thing to understand about photographing Point Ruston. Rainier hides more often than it shows, and the clear mornings when it rises clean above Commencement Bay are fewer than visitors expect. I check the forecast obsessively and I still get it wrong half the time. When it works, it really works. The boardwalk runs east to west along the bay, which means the mountain sits to the southeast and the light comes across it from the left in the early morning. That is the photograph. Rainier catching first light, the bay still glassy, a few sailboats moored in the foreground for scale. By midmorning the clouds have usually built around the summit and the moment is gone. I also come back here for the evenings, which are a different photograph entirely. Golden hour pulls the city skyline into warm relief and the bay turns the color of weak tea. The mountain is often invisible by then but it does not particularly matter. The boardwalk itself is the subject - couples walking, the long lines of the promenade, the water on one side and the new buildings on the other. There is something worth noting about what this place used to be. A copper smelter stood here for most of the twentieth century and poisoned the soil for miles. The fact that I can now walk a clean boardwalk and photograph a mountain across a recovering bay is its own quiet argument for patience. Bring a longer lens for the mountain. Bring a wider one for everything else.

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