Sometimes exploration isn’t about finding somewhere new. It’s about finally stopping at a place you’ve passed many times before.
In the spring of 2022, I found myself near Vantage, Washington, along the Columbia River. I wasn’t there with a particular photograph or destination in mind. After spending some time near the river, I was driving back along Old Highway 10 when Rocky Coulee caught my attention.
I had driven past the coulee many times before. This time, I stopped.
Four years earlier, the Ryegrass Coulee Fire had burned through the Vantage area. The July 2018 wildfire burned more than 1,600 acres, forced the evacuation of Vantage, closed Interstate 90, and affected the Rocky Coulee area.
By the spring of 2022, grasses had returned across the burned slopes. Scattered among them were the skeletal remains of trees killed by the fire.
There weren’t many. There were just enough to make me curious.
I put on my hiking boots, shouldered my camera pack, and started walking into the coulee.
Exploring Rocky Coulee
Rocky Coulee is part of the dry shrub-steppe country surrounding Vantage and the Columbia River. It’s a very different landscape from the wet forests and river valleys found west of the Cascade Range.
The coulee sits within the Columbia Plateau, a landscape built by enormous basalt lava flows millions of years ago. Erosion and the Ice Age floods later helped shape the coulees, exposed rock, and open terrain found throughout this part of central Washington.
But geology wasn’t what made me stop that day.
It was the trees.
Against the spring grasses, their dark trunks and bare branches stood apart from the surrounding landscape. From the road, I could see only a few. Once I started walking, I began finding more.
Some remained standing. Others had fallen. Their bare forms created lines and shapes against the simpler textures of the grass and open hillsides.
I began photographing them one at a time.
Blackened Trees Among Returning Grass
I wasn’t trying to document the Ryegrass Coulee Fire.
Four years had passed. The active fire was long gone, and grasses had returned across the slopes.
What remained interested me visually.
The blackened trunks and branches offered strong shapes against the surrounding landscape. Working in black and white simplified the scenes even further. Without color, my attention remained on form, line, texture, and the relationship between each tree and the open space around it.
Each tree was different.
Rather than looking for one photograph that represented everything I was seeing, I began treating the trees as individual studies.
A Landscape in Transition
The contrast between the burned trees and returning grasses was what initially held my attention.
The fire had left obvious marks on the landscape, yet vegetation was growing around those remnants. I wasn’t trying to make an ecological statement about recovery. I was responding to what I could see in front of me.
The landscape was changing.
The blackened trees still carried visible evidence of the fire. In time, more of them would fall, vegetation would continue to change, and the scene I photographed that spring would look different.
These six photographs record one stage in that continuing process.
A Project I Didn’t Plan
I didn’t drive to Rocky Coulee that day intending to create a photography project.
I hadn’t scouted the burned trees. I didn’t have compositions planned. I hadn’t even planned to stop there.
Something beside the road simply caught my attention.
That’s one of the things I enjoy about carrying a camera into the landscape. I may know the general area I’m heading into, but I don’t necessarily know what I’m going to photograph when I get there.
Sometimes nothing develops.
Other times, curiosity leads somewhere unexpected.
On this spring day at Rocky Coulee, it became Blackened Trees.
From the Field
I also made a short video while hiking and photographing Rocky Coulee that day. It offers a glimpse of the landscape surrounding these photographs and what I encountered while exploring the coulee. You can view it on YouTube.
Updated August 2026: This project page has been expanded with additional background about Rocky Coulee and the 2018 Ryegrass Coulee Fire. The photographs are from 2022, when this project was originally published.
