Some seven years back (1999), when I had a lot of free time on my hands that summer, I travelled a lot around the Pacific Northwest - the Cascades, Olympic Peninsula, Columbia River Gorge, Mt Rainier, Pacific Coast, Mt St Helens, skiing, and more...I also took a lot of photos with my Canon 35mm film SLR, and had posted many of them to my web site. Now that I have switched to a blog, I shall try and post at least some of those photos to the blog over the next several months.
The photo above is of Vista Point, as seen from the Portland Women's Forum Viewpoint (Chanticleer Point). This is a favorite with photographers, both amateur and professional. When I took this photo, I had a professional photographer there for company, who had been waiting patiently for a long time. He said, "the light is finally starting to get better" - though I admit I could see no such thing... But, taking his expert opinion - that he shared for free with me, I took out my camera, plonked it on a tripod, and took some photos - this above is one of the better ones, I think, though some of the background scenery is a bit washed out.
This on the left remains one of my favourite photos - it also would have come much better in the right lighting conditions, but I didn't have the luxury of waiting (possibly) several hours for that to happen...If you observe, there is a train track that runs parallel to the road - Interstate 84 (link to Oregon state gov site, wikipedia link) - on the left side of the photo. When I took the photo there was a train steaming along, and I managed to catch it at that instant. And, what I didn't realize at the time, there was a boat that is also captured in the photo - look on the right and you can see the wake of the boat in the Columbia River.
Finally, if you observe the top center portion of the photograph, you will see there is a scenic point that you can stop at to take even more photographs. At sunset, you can watch and catch some spectacular sights as the sun sets over the massive Columbia river.
And this photograph above is of the Columbia River, as seen from Vista Point.
This scenic route is best seen on the "Historic Columbia River highway"
