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Waterfalls of the Cascade Range, selected photographs and poems

Narada Falls

One hundred and eighty five feet, Narada means peace.  Never quiet, never still, swept by wind, constantly moving, falling, the 

Waters Ouzel's nest.

Rushing water drifting from separation to completeness, an unchanging journey from spray to wind, again and again.

Narada, one hundred and eighty five feet.  Ten thousand years to form your shape, the granite stones washed clean and plain, wet and smooth.

How many generations of Ouzel's have you held, felt their birth.  In my short years, sweet and sharp I've meditated until your fall was retrograde.

I've drifted with you until my eyes were blank 

and wet, from spray to wind,

again and again.

Narada Falls, Washington 1976

Falls, Van Trump Falls, Washington 1976

Black Diamond  Falls

The falls are above Green River, in a canyon deep with history, where mining language hangs thick with icicles to the granite cliffs on frozen days. Soon the sound of the creek in the cold morning air.

The coal is gone now and the mines have been lost behind years of new growth as I danced 

around my tripod to keep warm waiting for the light

to change.

I waited five hours and with this picture influenced by Duchamp I tried putting the landscape on as a mask, but nature and history keeps its secrets locked in time without any clues into, like the miners now buried, like the coal they dug.

Then all at once a flash of light kept that me waiting ran down the face of the cliff and the facets of ice danced and I stood still with purpose and reason. 

Comet Falls

Was in the large wet snow flakes failing on the Mountain Anemones in Van Trump Park, their fate doomed by the 

warm June ground. Or the myth that surrounds Rainier like the Mountain Hemlock, the last outpost of the forest below the line of the eternal snow.  Or the thick Douglas Fir grove, dark enough so the Western Sword Ferns looked like Japanese cut paper lace in their albino spectacle, hungry for light, as I hiked towards Comet Falls. Maybe it was the Chinese scrolls

in the museum, something ancient and timeless, like a signature at the bottom of an old postcard from someone you thought made a difference.  You recognize the name but the ink as blurred and faded like the muffled sound of the falls in the early summer snow storm.  As I approached its hidden 

boundary, the site obscured by the overlapping trees, twisting a cage which I worked myself through to find the composition, a portrait in shadows and shades of black and white silver.

Franklin Falls, Washington 1982

Comet Falls, Washington 1982

Black Diamond Falls, Washington 1982

Narada Falls, Washington 1980

Lower Wallace Creek Falls, Washington 1982

Kechess Lake Falls, Washington 1982

Christine Falls, Washington 1982