Spokane

This large disk of colored glass fragments decorated the Painter’s garden, glowing in the smokey evening sun. Their garden kept us well fed during our evacuation time with them.

Firefighting planes dropped pink retardant on a neighborhood along North Indian Trail Road, helping to save the homes as the Old Trails Fire swept by. The clean white garage door must have been up to avoid the all-covering pink goo.

Smokey the Bear’s warning was a bit late to help the firefighters in early August battling the Spokane Complex Fires. By then there was smoke in every direction!

We were guests of the Painters on the West Plains for a week after the fires of Aug. 1st. The amount of smoke in the air turned the evening sun the color of a stop light.

Evacuating our neighborhood on Aug. 1st meant driving straight toward a second major wildfire in Suncrest, then wandering on back roads and city streets for two-and-a-half hours before reaching friends in the West Plains.

When the Old Trails Fire blew up on August 1st, we watched the angry smoke clouds billow just a mile south of our house before we had to evacuate with over 60,0000 other residents.

The pendant lights hanging on long chains accentuate the high arches, banners and rose window on the west end of Spokane’s Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. Elaine sang at a special concert featuring several different church choirs there this summer.

Looking up through a tall aluminum tower carrying high-tension power lines, this airplane contrail added a different color and angle to the view.

Sometimes the most interesting images come from the most ordinary things, such as this small oil slick on a street in my neighborhood.

After a nearly 6 month break to work on other projects, I’m back with my best images from 2026. Let’s start with this calm reflection of winter trees along the Spokane River on a cloudy day.

This spectacular sunset in late October arced incandescent oranges and reds across the western sky near our home in Nine Mile Falls. The glory of God displayed in the heavens!

Sunset light on the power line towers near our house also produced a shadow of another tower on the field below. A reminder of the other towers, stretching off to the horizon, that bring electricity to all of us.

The Nishinomya Tsutakawa Japanese Garden in Manito Park has lovely landscaping, but the day we visited in October the focus of all the cameras was this heron balanced on one of the rocks in the garden’s pond. I thought it was a statue, until it turned its head toward me!

At the end of a sunset sky in Nine Mile Falls, the darkening clouds still boasted raspberry-colored linings above the power lines.

A back road near Nine Mile Falls led toward a lovely sunset on a recent July evening.

The white contrail of a jet and the black power lines made a momentary intersection above my head on a blue-sky afternoon. It makes a nice “y” in the sky, becoming an “x” shortly afterwards.

Sunset on a smokey evening created an orange glow behind a pine tree above the Spokane River near Nine Mile Falls on the last day of May.