Whatcom Falls Park

Author's Comments

The stone bridge is the picture most people take, and I understand the impulse. It is a beautiful piece of work, mossed and weathered into the landscape so completely that it reads more like something the creek built than something laid in 1939. But the photograph from the bridge looking down is not the photograph. The photograph is from creek level, on either bank, where the bridge becomes the frame and the falls become the subject. I come here in March, when the snowmelt is still moving through the system and the creek has weight to it. The falls are not tall - thirty feet, give or take - but the volume in spring gives them a presence that summer does not. Long exposures work here. The light in this park is filtered through old-growth Douglas fir, and even at midday it stays soft and green, which means you can hold a slow shutter without fighting the sun. Mornings are best. The mist comes up off the pool at the base of the falls and catches the light coming through the canopy in those cathedral shafts that make a temperate rainforest feel like something older than itself. The descent to the creek is steep and a little informal. Wear boots that can handle wet rock. Once you are down there the rest of the park more or less disappears, which is the trick of this place - it is genuinely urban, surrounded by Bellingham on all sides, and at creek level you would never know it. That is worth the scramble.

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