Oregon – Page 4 – Decaseconds

Oregon and Washington

2014-Aug-202014-Aug-20 adohertyh3 Comments

Aerial photography presents a magical, avian view of the world around us, but until I (someday) get a quadcopter drone, commercial air travel is my best friend. (Other than the fact that pretty much all other aspects of commercial air travel are pretty miserable.)

In any case, this photograph of the Columbia River, with Oregon on the right of the image and Washington on the upper-left, does a good job of capturing the strange mish-mash of agriculture, residences, and industry in the Pacific Northwest.

Behold, Columbia!

2014-Aug-15 adohertyhLeave a comment

Traveling to Portland, Oregon always guarantees some incredible sights, but I wasn’t prepared to gaze down the length of the Columbia River Gorge, all roads and forests and vista points and cliffs and sailboats. This is the Pacific Northwest!

Ghostly Dining

2013-Oct-18 adohertyh2 Comments

In the dining hall of Timberline Lodge (just around the corner from the gorgeous main hall), the imposing wood and the elegant place settings seem immovable and eternal. The human beings floating through, blurry and insubstantial and fleeting, are as ghosts.

Bunkroom: Before and After

2013-Oct-14 adohertyhLeave a comment

Waking up for Monday merits a pair of shots from my time at the Timberline Lodge in Oregon. Call it a before/after, if you’d like. The tiny (yet charming) bunkrooms were full of rustic furniture, but looked even more surreal in the glare of morning light the next day.

Central Chimney

2013-Oct-042013-Oct-04 adohertyh1 Comment

Running through the core of Oregon’s Timberline Lodge (last seen on Decaseconds Monday) is a chimney. The hexagonal and redwood-girthy chimney feeds multiple communal fireplaces at person-level, but up in the vaulted ceilings it takes on a wholly different Harry Potter charm. Wrought iron hardware and enormous beams bond the core to the rest of the lodge structure.

Post-Ski: Read

2013-Sep-302013-Oct-01 adohertyh6 Comments

At the end of a long day on Oregon’s Mt. Hood, returning in the evening to Timberline Lodge and its gorgeous/unique internal geometry is at once (slightly) alienating and welcoming. This quiet reading corner meets all of my criteria: not far from a fireplace and with the perfect chairs for curling up with hot chocolate. The blue fabric of these chairs, and their combination of rustic wood and steel, put me in mind of the This End Up furniture of the 1980s. The childhood associations only make the place more mentally comfortable.

Grass Harvest: Oregon

2013-Sep-20 adohertyh1 Comment

Down the road (and an hour later) from here, the grass harvest was continuing into the pastel-hued evening. The particulates kicked up by their work made this sort of localized haze that refracted the last sunlight to these incredible colors.

Oregon Surfaces

2013-Sep-09 adohertyh2 Comments

The topology of central Oregon at sunset is really very special: the land somehow has that “falling away beneath you” feeling of standing on a hilltop, that “in the hollow” feeling of standing in a valley, and that “goes on forever” feeling of standing on a plain all at the same time. Combine this with the variety of surfaces and textures to experience (gravel, grass, tarmac, wood, lake, sky, woods), and the experience becomes some hyperdimensional superposition of places and moments in time. With just the right car for the particular evening, you have a recipe for perfection.

Alpine Brew

2013-Apr-032013-Apr-02 adohertyhLeave a comment

I only spent two nights in the surreal alpine mountainscape of Oregon’s Timberline Lodge. Though my previous photos were either in the dark of night or far-off scenes, I’m quite enamored of this morning shot. The mountaintop and the slopes stand in the distance, the morning light is casting long shadows, and the shiny carafes of coffee promise a sharp start.

Moon Above

2013-Jan-02 adohertyhLeave a comment

Back to lovely, bucolic central Oregon. Something about an active field, with the pines and the farmhouse in the distance, mixes with the moon above to convey a sense of “a hard day’s work.” If it were a painting, I’d call it “Western Art.”

After the Grass Harvest

2012-Nov-072012-Nov-07 adohertyhLeave a comment

This bucolic hillside in Corvallis, OR is a special sight. In the rolling heartland of the state, the grass seed harvest happens for only a couple of weeks out of the whole year. I’ve previously posted other shots from the broad hills and valleys of this area, but I particularly like the interplay between the orange of the sky and the pink of the clouds as sunset creeps in.

Mt. Jefferson and the Patchwork

2012-Aug-152012-Aug-12 adohertyh1 Comment

Timberline lodge overwhelms its visitors with both its interior (as I posted last week) and its views from near the summit of Mt. Hood. Fifty miles away is Mt. Jefferson; between the two, as we see today, are acres of forest. Within these spaces are these tiny patchwork spots, cut clean from foresting. They regrow surprisingly quickly; Oregon seems to handle the whole process pretty effectively.

Today’s photography is definitely worth clicking through to the large size; the detail in the forests is hypnotic.

Quiet in the Lodge

2012-Aug-02 adohertyh6 Comments

I spent several nights this week at Oregon’s Timberline Lodge, located very literally at the timber line of Mt. Hood. Just outside the room is nearly year-round skiing on the Palmer glacier (and the exterior used in The Shining), but the interior is constructed of enormous wood beams, nearly 100 years old (the lodge was built in 1936). The center of the hotel is this multi-story common room, featuring multiple levels of tiny reading areas, enormous fire places, and friendly bars.

Americana Double Feature

2012-Aug-012012-Aug-01 adohertyh3 Comments

I had my own staging of Two-Lane Blacktop in central Oregon this weekend, with the company of this particularly lovely 911 Carrera 4S Cabriolet. This is grass seed country, and this particular weekend fell in the middle of the harvest. Long, perfectly maintained roads are intercut with forested hillsides and busy fields. By this point in the evening, however, nightfall brought calm with it.

For every sunny hilltop like the one above, there was a tree-lined valley. The setting sun really picks out the details of every treetop, but it’s a shame that Oregon has such a clean, healthy atmosphere. Without other molecules in the air to scatter the light, the sunsets lack the exciting colors of other parts of the country. This photograph captures the feeling of blasting down the road, wind in my hair, with only an occasional truck for company.