Photos by request

This last summer, I took these pictures just because – just because it’s a fact of life here that goods move up and down the Columbia River.   The Columbia River begins up in British Columbia, Canada, and stretches over 1200 miles.  Until dams were built on the US parts of the river, water-bourne traffic had to stop below Bonneville, Washington, because of Celilo Falls, a major fishing area for the native inhabitants of this area.  Shipping moved in segments on the river, between falls and rapids.  For thousands of years, Celilo was a gathering place, a place to catch some of the stupendous number of salmon who migrated by on their way to and from the Pacific.  Locks were built to lift river traffic up to the new levels of the river, and for many years, the Columbia has served as a way to move agricultural products from the interior to Portland and to Astoria and ports on the river to be shipped all over the world.

The Columbia Gorge:

This shot was taken from Crown Point, looking up the river, in September, when the river was signifiacantly lower than it is right now.

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Here, a barge string moves east up the river, with Washington State in the background.

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This is east of Crown Point, the pictures taken from Memaloose Rest Stop on I-84.

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I like to frame my shots with trees or natural features – this was an attempt to do so, and is a little less succesful than I’d like.

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Washington State looks nothing like you imagine – most people think of Seattle and RAIN.  The Olympic Pennisula, west of Seattle, has areas of rain forest, where the rain is nearly measured in feet, but most of the state is dry, like this.

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From this last summer’s shots, I have some of Depoe Bay:

(I know I’ve spelled Depoe Bay as "Depot Bay" at times, and Depot is the name on the Rand-McNally map I use at home – but there  are many versions of the name)

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Depoe Bay is called "The world’s smallest Harbor", and no cruise ship will ever make a port call here – it is tightly tucked into an inlet of the ocean.

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Looking through the pics on my Photobucket page, I don’t see an

awful lot of river traffic pics… but there is a whole series of pictures taken during "Fleet Week" here in Portland, an annual part of The Rose Festival.  The battleship Iowa came to call once when I was here, and in the past, before 9/11, we used to get a dozen or more Navy ships of all kinds, but since that time, we haven’t had many US Navy ships here, visiting.

I guess they’ve been busy, the last ten or eleven years.

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