Discovering a wild spot

A couple weeks ago I stumbled across a wild spot on the Hoquiam River in my hometown of Hoquiam, Wash.

It's a spot I had never seen before. I was rambling around the grounds of the abandoned mill in the northeast part of town. (The mill is the setting for my fictional story Toenails of a Dog and farther along the river bank toward the outskirts of town than my usual haunt at Immanuel Baptist Church.) My thought was to photograph the derelict urban space, perhaps for the Urban Exploration community, but I was drawn by the trees and grass to the backside of the mill lot, where I discovered a beaten path that I knew would lead to the river.

The sun danced in and out of the clouds, hoping for a peek of itself in the river's mirror.

Across the river, steam rose from the Hoquiam Plywood mill.

I'm not sure what that hunk of rusted metal used to be. Part of the old mill left behind. It looks a bit like a skateboard ramp.

It made a nice screen for the sun to project shadows.

The tide was out, exposing the mud and the sculpted riverbank.

I usually try to include our animal friends in these posts of my photowalks. They were not out in large numbers on this day (not enough to switch to my 75-300mm zoom for a portrait), but they were present.

A flock of geese followed the river out of town into the wild beyond.

The whole time I was photographing, a murder of crows discussed the advent of me from this little stand of trees.

In Hoquiam's booming timber days, the river all the way out and into the Grays Harbor bay was lined with wooden docks. All that remains now are the dock pilings, to play with as subjects.

When I had finished photographing my newly discovered spot (without nearly exhausting all its photographic possibilities), I refused the easy path back to the mill lot and instead made my way south through the woods and brambles in the direction of Immanuel Baptist Church. I had seen what looked like a portion of blacktop road along the bank in that direction, and wanted to see where it led.

It is a blacktop road, overgrown and falling off into the river as the bank erodes, which leads back to the edge of the mill lot (though I had to scale a pile of tree branches as tall as my head to get there). It's a whole other little place to photograph and explore more extensively...