Monthly Archives: October 2019

For Sale …?

“Well-Used Tractor Lot”, The Palouse

“Experienced tractors for sale – Cheap!” Here’s a little more history of the Palouse. Scattered across the Palouse next to old barns and fields are old farm equipment. Here was an anomaly. This enterprising individual had collected a variety of old tractors of the 40’s and early 50’s vintage (I think) and put them on display.

The site brought back early memories of my childhood growing up on an apple orchard in the upper Yakima Valley. I can remember riding on my grandpa’s John Deere crawler working in the orchard. It was hard to start with the hand crank in the front. But when it did, what a roar it made. I remember sitting on my grandpa’s lap pulling the turning handles to to make the machine turn. It took all I had, pulling with two hands and my whole body. What a thrill! I was heart broke when he traded it in for a wheeled tractor.

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Bygone Times

Old Barn, The Palouse

Driving along the back roads of the Palouse is an excursion of modern mechanized farming mixed with remnants of a bygone era. We encountered this barn along a dusty dirt farm road. My mind started to wonder who it was build by and when it was built. What was its and its owner’s history? It must have been a relative small farmer since the building itself was small compared to many of the large barns in the area. How could a small farmer survive? This one probably did not for very long.

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Steptoe Butte


Steptoe Butte from Kamiak State Park

About an hour prior to taking this image, I was at the top of Steptoe looking over the Palouse Plain. (Refer to the first image of this series I posted about a week ago.) Now I am at the bottom of Kamiak Butte looking across the plain up to Steptoe Butte. In this image, I am trying to emphasize the curves of the fields and how they “feed up” toward Steptoe. The small bales of hay in the middle field add a little scale to the image.

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Whirligigs

“Surprise”

Driving along back roads in the Palouse is a treat. Views of rolling hills caught my eyes. Graceful lines of hills and and the contrast of cut and plowed fields ran everywhere. I stopped to collect a set of images. As I got back into my car, I looked up to the embankment above me and saw this contraption of whirligigs looking over the edge. Farm implements have unusual shapes as this hay raker demonstrates. What is more impressive is to see one working in the field.

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Steptoe View

Steptoe View

It has been over 3 months since I last posted an image. It’s been a busy summer. Since my last post, the user interface for WordPress has changed a little. So here goes …

I will be trying to catch up with the photography that I have been doing over the summer through a series of mini-projects. The first will be from a recent trip to the Palouse in southeastern Washington. The view from Steptoe Butte was a flowing mixture of golds and various shades of brown. It was a cloudy morning with very little contrast. Then the sun broke through illuminating bright streaks across the landscape. The whole scene changed drastically. I chose to focus my images on small vignettes as opposed to the overall landscape. This lone tree and lines of the freshly plowed fields caught my eye.

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