No doubt there are sentient beings more miserable than a writer unable to write.  I just happen to be a writer, so it’s this cubicle of despair that’s most familiar to me. Writer’s block is usually transient. What I tumbled into three years ago was quite different—a prolonged period of depression and grief that left me at a loss for words. Any story, even a modest act of journalism, requires an energy and a confidence that I didn’t have and didn’t feel inclined to fake.

I still can’t watch the Tom Hanks movie “Castaway” without dissolving into tears at his  rain-drenched scene with Helen Hunt. It’s just so heartbreaking. But the film is also about perseverance and flotation. Somewhere in my dark night of the soul my camera became the paddle for my life raft, so to speak. Continue reading Sharing the Light →

One of the larger reasons I’m a Spokanite is because of our stunning inventory of trees. It’s hard to leave them behind for very long. I remember, as a kid, family car rides from Pasco, and how I felt when we reached the tree line near Sprague, and there began to absorb the enveloping greenness and the smell of pines. After the November storm that brought so many of them down, I’ve wanted to frame an homage to trees from photos I’ve taken the past few years. This is that. Treeshine.

The late J Harlen Bretz is, for lack of a better description, the patron saint of inland Northwest geology. Early in his long career, he had the audacity to propose his explanation for the palisade-walled canyons, braided dry channels, and majestic buttes that characterize much of the lower Columbia Basin. Bretz originally referred to the catastrophic event as the “Spokane Flood” because it looked as though present-day Spokane had been the source, or at least the spigot, for a massive torrent that could explain the terrain.

Today we often refer to it as the ancient Lake Missoula floods, caused when a lake of glacial meltwater, half the size of Lake Michigan, broke though its ice dam. This happened several times during the most recent ice age, and perhaps as recently as 13,000 years ago. When these all but unimaginable floods occurred, the rampaging waves of water and ice suddenly headed toward present-day Pasco were hundreds of feet deep and traveled at speeds approaching 80 miles an hour.

About eastern Washington’s scabland canyons, Bretz wrote that the resulting “labyrinthine” pattern of ‘bare rock knobs and buttes” is “unlike any other land surfaces on the earth.”

It took Bretz nearly a half century to see his theory validated by, among other things, satellite imagery. I don’t have nearly that much time left, but even if I did I doubt I could spend enough of it in the hauntingly quiet and beautiful corners of this evident cataclysm. In the meantime, here’s Volume II. Volume I was published last year.—Tim Connor