Snoqualmie Falls

Author's Comments

Spring is when the river makes its argument. By late May the snowmelt is still feeding the Snoqualmie hard, and the falls run with a volume that vibrates in your chest before you ever see them. You hear it from the parking lot. The mist column rises sometimes a hundred feet above the lip, depending on the wind, and on cool mornings it catches the early light and goes silver against the dark cedars on the canyon walls. The upper viewpoint is the one everyone uses and there is a reason. The geometry is right from there. But I have come to prefer the lower trail, the steep walk down through second-growth forest to the platform at the base, where the scale of the thing actually registers. Two hundred and sixty-eight feet is an abstract number until you are standing under it and feeling the air move. Come early. Seven in the morning on a weekday in winter and you might have it close to yourself, which matters at a place this loved. Winter mornings also bring the mist that the photographs want, the kind that softens the cedars into layers and turns a long exposure into something closer to a painting than a record. A neutral density filter earns its place here. So does patience for the wind to settle, because the spray drifts and a lens left uncovered for thirty seconds will be unusable. This is sacred ground to the Snoqualmie people, and you can feel that even before you read the signs. I try to photograph it the way I would photograph anything that does not belong to me. Carefully. Quietly. With the understanding that I am a visitor.

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