7 hours ago
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Wildfire smoke covered much of central and eastern Washington in August, and air quality in many towns stayed in hazardous territory for weeks. If you shoot small towns, farmland, and roadside history, smoke like that changes your light, flattens your color, and limits how long you can stay outside to make a picture.
Brae Hunziker drove east on I-90 toward Spokane with his friend Bryan Birks, a large-format photographer, during that stretch, planning to stop in towns he had passed on recent trips but never photographed. Ritzville came first. It's a town of fewer than 2,000 people where I-90 meets U.S. 395, and around 1900, it was regarded as the biggest wheat shipping point in the world, moving nearly 2 million bushels through its warehouses in 1901 and 1902. Once the interstate pulled traffic away from downtown, development slowed, and as in many rural towns, a lot of its old character survived.
About 25 minutes down the road, Sprague is easy to miss. It began in the 1870s as a sheep camp called Hoodooville, after a local character known as Hoodoo Billy. Later, it was renamed for John W. Sprague, a Union general and railroad executive. The Northern Pacific Railroad once kept a headquarters and locomotive repair center there, until an 1895 fire destroyed much of the town. The railroad rebuilt in Spokane instead, and Sprague never recovered its importance. Today, about 500 people live there, though he finds traces of its past along the quiet streets.
He shot the trip on a Pentax 67II, his go-to camera this summer during what he calls another SLR phase, and he likes having two focal lengths to work with in its 55mm and 105mm lenses. His Mamiya 7 kit, by comparison, is down to a single 43mm after he broke two 65mm lenses for that system this year. He has also been cropping more frames than usual into panoramas with 6x14 proportions, mostly from the 55mm, whose wider view suits the format. He now catches himself composing with a pano crop in mind, and he may try a cutout mask in the Pentax viewfinder so he can frame panoramas directly. His film was split about evenly between Kodak Gold 200 and Kodak Ektacolor Pro 400, depending on whichever roll he pulled from his bag, except on the overcast second morning, when he believes he loaded the 400.
Panoramic framing has been creeping back into mainstream photography. The Hasselblad XPan built a cult following around its 65:24 frame on 35mm film, and Fujifilm put a dedicated aspect-ratio dial on the Fujifilm GFX100RF, with that XPan-style ratio among the options. With medium format film, you get a similar result by cropping, because a 6x7 negative holds enough detail to give up a large share of its height. Composition is harder. A strip that wide favors subjects that run horizontally, like a row of storefronts, a train of grain cars, or a long ridgeline. Anything with strong vertical interest, such as a lone silo or a church steeple, usually fights the format.
On day two, the route ran north from Spokane on U.S. 395 toward Colville and Kettle Falls, through country built by logging, railroads, gold rushes, and the fur trade. Farmland gives way to forested mountains and valleys as you enter the Okanogan Highlands, a landscape carved by ice sheets that advanced out of Canada in the last ice age. Colville, a commercial center for northeastern Washington with around 5,000 people, turned out to have one of the few RadioShack stores left in the country. Just west of it, Kettle Falls takes its name from a set of cascades on the Columbia River, about 50 miles south of the Canadian border, that ranked among the region's most important Indigenous fishing sites. When Grand Coulee Dam went up in the 1930s, the falls disappeared beneath what is now Lake Roosevelt, and because the dam had no fish passage, salmon were cut off from the upper river. When Lake Roosevelt drops far enough, the tops of the old falls still break the surface. Farther along, in the unincorporated community of Hunters, Hunziker spotted kids playing in puddles left by rain in a gravel lot, and as he pulled over, a logging truck rolled through town. He got the frame off in time, and it's one of his favorites from the trip.
From there, the pair made their way to Grand Coulee, a town that exists because of the dam. Workers came for jobs during the Great Depression, and the town soon had a reputation for taverns, gambling halls, and prostitution that got it called "the cesspool of the New Deal." It's a quiet place of around 1,000 people now, serving visitors bound for Banks Lake, Lake Roosevelt, and nearby recreation areas. On the drive home along I-90, he watched the sun fade as it dropped through the smoke. By his count, wildfires destroyed nearly 650 homes in Washington this year, most of them in Spokane County, where more than 65,000 people were forced to evacuate. Travel guides rarely send anyone east of the Cascades, but if history, geography, small towns, and side roads appeal to you, he encourages the trip, and he says that taking any exit off I-90 between the Vantage Bridge and Spokane turns up something to photograph quickly.
Bonus frames round out the video, some from a solo run toward Spokane a few days earlier, when he brought the Pentax but left his video camera at home.
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