I arrived at Corral Pass in the late afternoon and set up camp.
The sky was clear. After dinner, I picked up my camera and started walking.
I didn’t have a list of photographs I wanted to make. I was simply exploring the area and paying attention to what caught my eye.
It didn’t take long.
All around me were standing dead trees. Their pale trunks rose from the mountainside in dense groups. Some stood against distant ridges. Others crowded together within the forest. Broken branches reached into the open sky.
I knew almost immediately that the trees could become the subject of a photography project.
I just didn’t know what that project would look like yet.
A Forest Changed By Fire
The landscape I was walking through had been shaped by the 2017 Norse Peak Fire.
Lightning ignited a series of fires in the Norse Peak and William O. Douglas Wilderness areas in August 2017. The Norse Peak Fire ultimately burned 55,920 acres. Corral Pass campground itself burned during the fire.
Nearly a decade later, its effects remain visible.
Many of the trees still stand. Others have fallen. Living conifers grow among gray trunks. Openings created by the fire reveal parts of the surrounding mountains that once would have been hidden by forest.
The fire explains why the landscape looks the way it does.
But I wasn’t interested in simply documenting a burned forest.
I was more interested in what the landscape had become.
A Landscape Shaped By Time
Corral Pass sits high in the Cascade Range within the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, near the Norse Peak Wilderness. The surrounding country is a mix of high ridges, subalpine forest, meadows, and views toward Mount Rainier.
Like much of the central Cascades, this landscape has been shaped by volcanism, uplift, erosion, and glaciation. Those processes unfolded over immense spans of time.
Fire works on a much shorter scale, but it is another force of change. The standing snags I was photographing are part of that continuing story.
The human history of this country reaches back far beyond modern roads and trails.
For thousands of years, the White River and the route over Naches Pass connected Indigenous communities on both sides of the Cascades. Coast Salish peoples to the west and Sahaptin peoples to the east traveled through this country for trade, gathering, hunting, and family connections. Present-day descendants include members of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, Puyallup Tribe, and Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation.
Later, Euro-American settlers adapted portions of these older cross-Cascade routes. In 1853, the Longmire wagon party crossed nearby Naches Pass while attempting to reach Puget Sound. The crossing became part of the settler history of the region, although the difficult route never developed into the major wagon road its promoters had hoped for.
Knowing even a little of that history changes the way I think about landscapes that can appear remote or untouched.
They have stories extending far beyond the brief moment when I arrive with a camera.
Exploring Without Knowing What I Would Find
My usual way of photographing a place is to begin broadly.
I look for a sense of the larger landscape first. Then, as I spend more time there, I begin noticing smaller relationships.
That is what happened at Corral Pass.
I started with the mountain slopes and the broad patterns created by the standing trees.
Then I moved closer.
Living conifers stood against fields of pale snags.
A trail disappeared between tall trunks.
Inside the forest, fallen limbs crossed the repeated vertical lines of the standing trees.
I wasn’t trying to complete a predetermined series.
I was gathering possibilities.
That distinction matters to me.
I wrote recently about why I prefer to explore rather than scout for landscape photographs. I may know where I’m going, but I usually don’t know what photograph I’m going to make until I begin responding to the place in front of me.
That approach shaped The Forest That Remains.
An Evening And A Morning In The Forest
As evening settled in, the campground remained quiet.
Only two vehicles sat at the distant trailhead. One belonged to a hunter I spoke with briefly. Other than occasional aircraft overhead, the area felt peaceful.
At one point, I noticed the moon between the trees.
I hadn’t planned the photograph.
I hadn’t even been thinking about photographing the moon.
It was simply there.
That kind of discovery is one of the reasons I enjoy wandering with a camera without deciding beforehand what I’m supposed to find.
I returned to my camper at dark so I could start again at first light.
The next morning, I started photographing at first light and continued until around 1 p.m. The skies remained clear.
With more time to explore, I began looking less at the forest as a landscape and more at the individual forms within it.
Looking Up And Moving In
Eventually, my attention shifted upward.
From beneath the standing trees, trunks converged toward the sky. Broken branches became lines and gestures. Individual trees began to separate themselves from the larger forest.
One weathered tree especially caught my attention.
Its twisted branches were no longer simply part of the surrounding forest. Against the sky, they became almost sculptural.
This progression happens often when I spend enough time in one place.
At first, I see the landscape.
Then I begin seeing relationships within the landscape.
Eventually, I may stop thinking about mountains or trees at all.
I start seeing line, shape, repetition, texture, light, and shadow.
That is one reason black-and-white photography continues to interest me.
Removing color creates some distance from literal description. The landscape is still recognizable, but I can emphasize the parts of the scene that interested me most.
When A Forest Becomes Pattern
One of the later photographs takes that idea further.
Standing trees fill the frame. Some emerge from darkness. Others catch the light. Individual trunks begin to lose their identities within the larger pattern.
For me, this photograph is less about any particular tree.
It is about rhythm.
The repeated vertical forms create order inside what initially appears chaotic.
That shift from recognizable landscape toward abstraction became an important part of the finished project.
The photographs begin with a mountain ridge and a recognizable forest.
Gradually, the viewer moves inward.
The landscape becomes more enclosed.
Trees become individual forms.
Then those forms begin dissolving into pattern.
The final photograph opens the landscape again.
There is very little left in the frame.
Trees. Sky. Moon.
And quiet.
Finding The Project Afterward
By the time I packed up, I knew there was a photography project somewhere in what I had made.
Possibly more than one.
But I still didn’t know exactly what the finished project would become.
That came later.
Looking through the photographs at home allowed me to see relationships that weren’t as obvious while I was working in the field.
Some photographs repeated ideas already expressed more strongly elsewhere.
Others had specific roles.
One established the landscape.
Another brought me into the forest.
Some shifted attention toward individual trees.
Others reduced the forest to pattern and form.
Eventually, eight photographs remained.
Together, they became less about documenting the aftermath of a wildfire and more about my experience of moving through a transformed forest.
That is when The Forest That Remains began to feel like the right title.
I see change in these photographs.
I see endurance.
There is mortality, but also continued life.
There is order within disorder.
And as the series moves deeper into the forest, there is a gradual shift from describing a place toward interpreting it.
That is what I want from a photography project.
Not eight photographs that say the same thing.
Eight photographs that need one another.
Further Explorations
Fire-altered landscapes have appeared in my photography before, although each place has led me in a different direction.
In Blackened Trees, I photographed trees remaining after the 2018 Ryegrass Coulee Fire. There, the blackened forms stood against grasses and open country as the landscape continued to change.
I also explored the broader idea of recovery after wildfire in The Resilient Beauty of Nature: Lessons from Wildfire Landscapes. That project brings together photographs from several Washington landscapes and considers the relationship between fire, loss, regeneration, and the slow return of life.Â
The Forest That Remains feels different to me.
At Corral Pass, I became less interested in explaining wildfire and more interested in moving through what was left behind. The standing trees became landscape, structure, pattern, and eventually abstraction.
The forest had changed.
But it was still a forest worth spending time with.
