Wow is the opening comment. That’s all I had. The lighting designer who has spent forty years shaping how light falls on a room, on a stage, on a ballroom full of people — and I drove back from Rialto Beach at 1 in the morning completely at a loss for how to describe what I’d just seen.
It started in Europe. I was on spotty cell service somewhere on the Olympic Peninsula, checked Twitter to make sure the world hadn’t done anything catastrophic while I wasn’t looking, and the first thing that came up was the Eiger and the Jungfrau in Switzerland, white snow turned pink by something in the sky. I’ve been there. I know that landscape. Seeing it lit up like that stopped me cold. Within a few minutes it was clear this was happening everywhere — a geomagnetic storm strong enough to push the aurora south in a way that nobody had seen in years.
I drove to Rialto Beach in the dark and spent three hours on the most extraordinary beach photography session of my life. Massive driftwood logs, three and four feet in diameter, stacked along the shore like the aftermath of something enormous. I was using the root systems as frames, silhouetting them against a sky that was doing pink and green things that my camera captured and my eyes almost couldn’t believe. Strangers on a dark beach all pointing in the same direction. One of them got a silhouette of me at the tripod. I was doing time lapses, brackets, everything I had.
I said it last night and I’ll say it again: that kind of light brings people together in a way that’s hard to put into words. It just does.
Ruby Beach and the Coast
The drive south along the 101 gave me Ruby Beach and a handful of numbered beaches below it — dramatic sea stacks rising out of the water, the Pacific doing what it does on a gray Washington morning, the kind of scenery that makes you stop the car without planning to. I was perched above Beach Four at one point, watching the waves move around the rocks, still turning over last night in my mind.
I want to come back to this coast with more time. The 101 cuts inland just south of where I was, and the rest of the coast opens back up once you cross into Oregon at Astoria. It’s on the list.
Mount Rainier
The plan was to scout a lake or river near Mount Rainier where I could get the aurora reflected in water if it came again. What actually happened was a long day of driving, a hotel in Packwood that was further from everything than I would have liked, and a cold hour and a half at Paradise shooting stars and the mountain with no aurora in sight.
Packwood was the wrong call. If I was doing this again I’d stay in the cabins just outside the main gate, or push to find something closer to Paradise itself. The mountain at night, in the cold, with a headlamp and no gloves worthy of the temperature, is not ideal planning. I did get a few shots. The mountain was there, enormous and indifferent. The aurora did not materialize.
It’s hard to top what happened the night before. I knew that going in. Some days are just driving days, and that’s what this was. Not every episode is Rialto Beach. That’s fine. Rialto Beach was enough for both of them.
