Ryan Cooper

This is a quick look at a proposed National Monument, the Mesa Falls area in Idaho. Here's the lower falls, which apparently gonzo kayakers actually run sometimes: Mist from the upper falls: View from the lip of the upper falls: Further down:  On the way back I found this massive spillway structure on Island Park Reservoir: Look into the bottom of the spillway, where you could hear water moving but not see it:

Some quick snaps of my visit to Craters of the Moon after I interviewed the rangers. It's a giant volcanic plain—here are the kind of rocks one sees: Panorama: A volcanic throat: Which direction do you reckon the wind blows most of the time? The next few are all from a walk through one of the partially collapsed lava tubes, called Indian Tunnel: Finally, a very pretty sunset!

I was passing through the Columbia River Gorge very quickly, but made some time to stop and take a few action shots in Hood River. First, stand-up paddleboarding is apparently quite the thing: But it was a bit windy for that in the main channel. Saw a couple windsurfers, which used to be the most popular thing there: But the most popular sport, by far, was kiteboarding. Witness this kind of awkward shot: Also, too: More sweet tricks: The cool thing about kiteboarding was you could actually hang from the kite for quite a while. This lady's trick was just jumping way high and hanging in the air for about 15 seconds: I just wanted to get the bridge in the background here, as well as a sense of the size of the kites. They're big!

At my hotel in Troutdale a couple days ago there were a few folks staying that had just finished a Buick car show. I took some snaps just for fun: This lady's car was definitely the coolest: As shown by her first place trophy!

This is nuts.

Here are some snaps from my trip up to Mt St Helens. First, a view from about 2/3rds of the way up the road to Johnston Ridge Observatory. The most remarkable thing about my visit was how impressive the magnitude of the eruption remains were, and I tried to capture a sense of that. Here on the right (obviously) there is the mountain, and that hump on the left is Johnston ridge. The gray area in the middle is where a lot of the mountain went. It's a bit tough to see, but the valley in between the two used to be roughly 600 feet deeper. Here's a bit of a melodramatic video about the eruption, but it does have a nice (I believe genuine) slideshow of pictures of the scale of the initial landslide. Also don't miss this great set of contemporary pictures. Here's Coldwater Lake, which is on the other side of Johnston Ridge from the mountain. It's a lovely little place created by the massive sediment dam of the eruption. Here's a panorama I too...

I'll have more to say about this later, but for now just read this .