Episode 51 | Bonners Ferry to Wallace, ID
How to Photograph a Waterfall
Nobody asked me. But I’m going to tell you anyway, because I was walking to one and needed something to do with my mouth besides narrate trees.
Tripod. Manual mode. Aperture at f8 or f11 if you want everything sharp, up to f22 if it’s bright out and you’re trying to block light without blowing the exposure. ISO as low as it will go because noise is the enemy. Shutter speed around half a second to a full second, depending on the volume of water — too much water at too slow a shutter and the whole thing turns into white fog, which is not the goal. The goal is soft, silky, wispy motion that suggests the water is moving without looking like it’s been erased.
If the sun is bright and you can’t get the shutter slow enough without overexposing, you need a neutral density filter. Think of it as sunglasses for the camera. I use a variable two-to-five stop ND. It gives you control without having to swap filters every time the light changes.
I delivered all of this while scanning the treeline for bears, which I want to be clear is not a normal part of my photography process back home in Florida. The bear spray was in the bag. The bears remained theoretical.
The waterfall itself was a mild disappointment. The trail was longer than advertised, the only real vantage point was from above — which flattens everything and makes even a respectable waterfall look like a trickle — and I had brought the video tripod instead of the photo tripod, which meant I spent twenty minutes improvising a setup that a correct tripod would have solved in thirty seconds. I got a few shots. They might be good. I’ll find out when I edit.
Disappointed in a waterfall. Genuinely first world problem.
Sandpoint
I had originally planned to stay in Sandpoint the night before, and driving through it on the way south I immediately understood why it was on the list. The town sits on a long lake with the mountains behind it and has that particular quality of a place that knows it’s beautiful but hasn’t fully been taken over by the fact yet. There’s a grass overlook near the harbor, a compact little downtown, the kind of walkable main street that feels increasingly rare.
I had a conversation in the parking lot with a man who turned out to have a lot of opinions about what’s happening in this country. We agreed on more than I expected. I’m not going to get into specifics, partly because this isn’t that kind of video and partly because, as I noted at the time, sharing half of what we talked about would probably get my channel flagged. Let’s just say we had a genuine exchange and I drove away thinking about it for the next fifty miles.
Coeur d’Alene
I’ve said some version of “I could live here” more times on this trip than I can count. Coeur d’Alene might be the most convincing case I’ve made yet.
The lake is enormous and spectacularly clear. There are bike paths running along the water. The downtown has actual character without having been completely polished into something generic. On a Sunday afternoon it was busy in a way that felt like locals, not just tourists passing through. I drove around the lake as long as I could justify, watching deer appear at the edges of the road every few minutes, and thought about what slow travel would look like in a place like this. A week, maybe two. A rental with a view of the water. No agenda beyond the light.
The real estate market, as I reported to my mother when she called to ask if I’d seen anything worth investing in, is not currently cooperating. But I’m noting it for later.
Wallace
I arrived in Wallace after dark, which turns out to be exactly the right time to arrive in Wallace.
Seven hundred people. Every single building in the downtown area on the National Register of Historic Places. The last stoplight on Interstate 90 until 1991, when the state finally built an overpass and Wallace responded by holding a funeral for the traffic light before they removed it. A silver mining past that never quite faded. Storefronts full of things you’d need an afternoon to properly catalog. A model train display. What appeared to be a thrift store for farm equipment. And enough bars and restaurants that you could stay a week without repeating yourself.
Wallace calls itself the center of the universe. This is an extremely confident position for a town of 700 people in the Idaho panhandle. Having walked the streets that evening, I found it difficult to argue.
It was also the filming location for the 1997 disaster film Dante’s Peak, in which Pierce Brosnan races a volcano. The town played a sleepy mountain community sitting on an active volcano. There is no active volcano in Wallace. They didn’t ask.
I walked the streets until the shops closed and stood outside photographing storefronts and thinking about what Frank had said — that these videos should have more conversations with locals in them. Wallace is exactly the kind of place that would reward that approach. Every building has a story. The people inside them probably have better ones.
I went back to the hotel instead. But I made a note to get up early and walk it again before leaving.
