To stand at Snoqualmie Falls during a flood is to feel true power. The deafening roar, the shaking ground, the saturating mist, the immeasurable volume and weight. Yet Snoqualmie Falls has a power that runs deeper than these physical symptoms. This is the place where the Snoqualmie Tribe believes is the very source of their creation. Where Moon the Transformer created the various people and all the rivers as they are now.
For the people who have lived in this place since time immemorial, this is the center of the universe.
A decade ago, my family moved to a beautifully forested property just below Snoqualmie Falls.
Over the subsequent years, I’ve visited and photographed the falls in every season and every state of conditions, from deep freeze to thundering flood, from pools in the riverbed to helicopters overhead. I’ve shared space with the osprey who nest on the cliffs of the falls, the herons who swoop through the canyon with prehistoric grace, the steelhead, the bears and the elk. No visit to the falls is ever the same, more times than I can remember, I’ve been legitimately awestruck by the alchemy of water, stone, light, and gravity.
Traveling from my home below the falls to my gallery in North Bend, I pass the falls most every day, and relish any excuse to stop and see the show. A bit of golden light in a late summer sunset, a morning fog swirling in the falls basin.
One night, I realized that the path of a rising full moon would be directly above the falls.
I donned a wetsuit, put my camera in a dry bag, and swam up the river to see the very creation story play out in real time as the moon and the falls combined to render the world anew.
And yet, even as fleeting moments of pure revelation can still be found, the world is not created anew every night, and each morning the rising sun reveals a landscape that is also adorned with a hotel, a hydroelectric power plant, some percentage of the 1.5 million people who visit the falls annually. Each summer, the narrow, and normally quiet road where my children learned to ride their bikes is gridlocked by thousands of floaters who come to enjoy the river ride below the falls. While none of this is inherently wrong, it nonetheless feels somehow a desecration, especially as the White Claw cans, single-use plastic water bottles, discarded clothing and failed inflatables pile up on the shoreline; left for someone else to clean up.
My sincere wish with sharing this photography is that these unique perspectives on the falls, born of a love of the place that is home to me and my family, and that is foundational to the original peoples, will help the viewer to see beyond the postcard to find the sacred. To realize that if we are to share in the beauty and the awe, we must also share in the care, the protection and the stewardship.
To create a future for generations to come
we must look for guidance to the people who have cared for this land for countless generations past.
The amazing work of the Snoqualmie Tribe Ancestral Lands Movement calls upon us to practice reciprocity with the land, the plants, the animals and each other. To treat the lands with the respect they deserve and to be active collaborators in the care and restoration of this sacred place. I ask visitors to consider their visits to the falls as they would a visit to any renowned place of worship; to treat the Falls with the same respect that they would afford to a cathedral, mosque, temple, or shrine.
Just because there is no roof, doesn’t make it any less holy. For many of us, it only makes it more so.
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