We were here before statehood in 1889.  My grandfathers, father , uncles, everyone, worked at mining, homesteading, whatever they could find, but mostly logging.  My father was a logger’s logger, referred to as a “Bull Bucker” who ran timber cutting crews.  Later he had a small logging company , or “gypo”.

Growing up on a “stump ranch” (logged over land) was pretty basic.  We tried to be self-sufficient.  That meant having a garden, hauling water from a well (until we got electricity when I was about ten years old), raising chickens, trading firewood for a side from a pig, trading eggs for butter…..all the kind of stuff that sounds like an episode from “Little House on the Prairie”!

What wasn’t romantic were trips to the outhouse, the wind that whistled through un-insulated walls in winter, my mother toiling over a blazing hot stove in August to can food for the coming winter and wearing the same clothing for a week!

Poor people don’t know they are poor when the neighbors are poor too!  There were social occasions when several families got together to buzz saw wood into stove lengths or in the fall to feast on fresh venison, honey from the hives, biscuits from the oven and corn on the cob.  At those times nearly everything came from the forest or the garden and we kids basked in a sense of plenty and security.

Watching my father melt lead to cast our own 30-30 bullets (less than thirty-five miles airline from Bill Gates’ mansion today!), I would never have guessed that someday I would earn my living processing photographs with a computer and chat with photographers in other countries via the internet.  It still stuns me!

Hunting and fishing were as important as raising a garden was to our living.  Although as a kid I was fascinated by guns and hunted deer, bear and grouse, I never enjoyed killing.  Being delegated at about age ten to take on the chore of chopping the heads off chickens for the Sunday dinner made me feel very grown up………until I chopped the first one!

I still have an 1893 bear trap that my father bought for $3.00 in 1917.  The amount of pain and suffering inflicted by that device is incalculable:  I’m sure my father trapped at least 20 bear with it and that many again with another trap we had.  We greased our boots with bear grease and my mother rendered bear grease in the oven to use in cooking.

During the great depression of the 1930’s there were four years during which my father never had a single day of paid labor.  According to my mother, one time game was scarce and for four months we had nothing but lard and potatoes to eat.

Hard times create hard people:  compassion for our fellow creatures goes first when times are bad.  Therefore, we owe a big debt to Mother Earth now when times are good.  I can’t do anything about the suffering caused by those traps in the past, but I have no excuse for not doing everything possible now to preserve habitat.  A trap is a tragedy for a bear, loss of habitat kills all bears.

Today, I sublimate my hunting instincts by using a camera.  I no longer kill directly, but I still hear myself say, “I nailed him!” when I trip the shutter on an animal.  I don’t have to actually kill: society does it much more efficiently and in oblique ways.  Filling a wetland is much more efficient than killing the ducks one at a time with a shotgun!  As we were, so shall we be……..unfortunately!

After WWII, times improved dramatically but I didn’t have money for college, so just out of high school during the Korean war I joined the navy and at the end of my hitch entered college on the G.I. bill.  I graduated from Western Washington University in 1960 with a wife and a teaching degree.

While in College, I became an avid mountain climber and was president of the college Alpine Club. Over the years I climbed in Canada, Mexico, Africa, Alaska and the Northwest.  It was climbing that got me into remote and gorgeous places and triggered my desire to photograph.

For ten years I taught in the public schools of Alaska and Washington, including community college extension courses in photography and mountaineering.  I applied for some federal grants and spent my last several teaching years producing visual programs on the environment.

The  desire to photograph full-time won out and I quit teaching in 1970.  I tried stock photography for a while until I decided it was a good way to starve (still is!) and began selling my prints at art fairs and my own gallery.  That has been my true love.  I shoot what I think is exciting, print it, and supervise the framing and marketing.  Wanting to cut back on shows in 1994, I began producing poster and note card reproductions of my best work.  By 1998 we had 100 posters and 200 note cards in print, had leased a warehouse and had over 900 accounts, a staff of seven…..and a lot of headaches!

Today, distribution is handled by Island Art, a Canadian company.  We keep our gallery open Wednesday through Saturday and also run our online business.  In 2004 my son Bryce joined us and now is honing his photographic skills and teaching me how to survive on white water rivers!  Maybe you’ll want to bookmark our website, because we’re going to be around a long, long time!  

After 35 years of the photography business, there is so much that could be written about ethics, photographic techniques, the digital revolution, crazy adventures dangling from a rope or staring a bear in the eye, on and on……..but before I close I must talk about my number one partner, Ann.

We met mountain climbing and shared peaks in Africa and underwater adventures in the Caribbean and the South Pacific.  I always brought the wild-eyed vision and hare-brained schemes to our business: Ann made sure the good ones paid off and quietly made me justify the bad ones until I saw the light!  It wouldn’t have worked without her!

NOW FOR THE COMMERCIAL:

Conservation is important: no matter what your political beliefs are, we all need clean air and water, decent food and an opportunity to lead a  productive life.  But no matter how much we pursue conservation, our goals will elude us if world population continues unchecked.  We are headed for an environmental train wreck unless we remove population issues from the “Do not discuss list”.  We have to move beyond cultural taboos and face the truth that we already exceed the sustainable carrying capacity of the earth.  Start by electing realists rather than sectarian phantasists!

Self-interest is a good thing: It gets us out of bed in the morning and makes us go that extra step to do a good job.  But today, self-interest has morphed into unregulated greed as exemplified by the Enron fiasco.  Enron and the great depression both are cases of unregulated capitalism devouring it’s own young!  We suddenly have the greatest deficit in world history.  Your children and grandchildren, not yet born, will still be paying interest on that foolish debt.

We are headed the wrong way and it up to us to get America back on track!